The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell Part 98

Don't believe in the Flying Dutchman?

I've known the fellow for years; My b.u.t.ton I've wrenched from his clutch, man: I shudder whenever he nears!

He's a Rip van Winkle skipper, A Wandering Jew of the sea, Who sails his bedevilled old clipper In the wind's eye, straight as a bee.

Back topsails! you can't escape him; The man-ropes stretch with his weight, And the queerest old toggeries drape him, The Lord knows how long out of date!

Like a long-disembodied idea, (A kind of ghost plentiful now,) He stands there; you fancy you see a Coeval of Teniers or Douw.

He greets you; would have you take letters: You scan the addresses with dread, While he mutters his _donners_ and _wetters_,-- They're all from the dead to the dead!

You seem taking time for reflection, But the heart fills your throat with a jam, As you spell in each faded direction An ominous ending in _dam_.

Am I tagging my rhymes to a legend?

That were changing green turtle to mock: No, thank you! I've found out which wedge-end Is meant for the head of a block.

The fellow I have in my mind's eye Plays the old Skipper's part here on sh.o.r.e, And sticks like a burr, till he finds I Have got just the gauge of his bore.

This postman 'twist one ghost and t'other, With last dates that smell of the mould, I have met him (O man and brother, Forgive me!) in azure and gold.

In the pulpit I've known of his preaching, Out of hearing behind the time, Some statement of Balaam's impeaching, Giving Eve a due sense of her crime.

I have seen him some poor ancient thrashing Into something (G.o.d save us!) more dry, With the Water of Life itself washing The life out of earth, sea, and sky.

O dread fellow-mortal, get newer Despatches to carry, or none!

We're as quick as the Greek and the Jew were At knowing a loaf from a stone.

Till the couriers of G.o.d fail in duty, We sha'n't ask a mummy for news, Nor sate the soul's hunger for beauty With your drawings from casts of a Muse.

CREDIDIMUS JOVEM REGNARE

O days endeared to every Muse, When n.o.body had any Views, Nor, while the cloudscape of his mind By every breeze was new designed, Insisted all the world should see Camels or whales where none there be!

O happy days, when men received From sire to son what all believed, And left the other world in bliss, Too busy with bedevilling this! 10

Beset by doubts of every breed In the last bastion of my creed, With shot and sh.e.l.l for Sabbath-chime, I watch the storming-party climb, Panting (their prey in easy reach), To pour triumphant through the breach In walls that shed like snowflakes tons Of missiles from old-fashioned guns, But crumble 'neath the storm that pours All day and night from bigger bores. 20 There, as I hopeless watch and wait The last life-crushing coil of Fate, Despair finds solace in the praise Of those serene dawn-rosy days Ere microscopes had made us heirs To large estates of doubts and snares, By proving that the t.i.tle-deeds, Once all-sufficient for men's needs, Are palimpsests that scarce disguise The tracings of still earlier lies, 30 Themselves as surely written o'er An older fib erased before.

So from these days I fly to those That in the landlocked Past repose, Where no rude wind of doctrine shakes From bloom-flushed boughs untimely flakes; Where morning's eyes see nothing strange, No crude perplexity of change, And morrows trip along their ways Secure as happy yesterdays. 40 Then there were rulers who could trace Through heroes up to G.o.ds their race, Pledged to fair fame and n.o.ble use By veins from Odin filled or Zeus, And under bonds to keep divine The praise of a celestial line.

Then priests could pile the altar's sods, With whom G.o.ds spake as they with G.o.ds, And everywhere from haunted earth Broke springs of wonder, that had birth 50 In depths divine beyond the ken And fatal scrutiny of men; Then hills and groves and streams and seas Thrilled with immortal presences, Not too ethereal for the scope Of human pa.s.sion's dream or hope.

Now Pan at last is surely dead, And King No-Credit reigns instead, Whose officers, morosely strict, Poor Fancy's tenantry evict, 60 Chase the last Genius from the door, And nothing dances any more.

Nothing? Ah, yes, our tables do, Dramming the Old One's own tattoo, And, if the oracles are dumb, Have we not mediums! Why be glum?

Fly thither? Why, the very air Is full of hindrance and despair!

Fly thither? But I cannot fly; My doubts enmesh me if I try, 70 Each Liliputian, but, combined, Potent a giant's limbs to bind.

This world and that are growing dark; A huge interrogation mark, The Devil's crook episcopal.

Still borne before him since the Fall, Blackens with its ill-omened sign The old blue heaven of faith benign.

Whence? Whither? Wherefore? How? Which? Why?

All ask at once, all wait reply. 80 Men feel old systems cracking under 'em; Life saddens to a mere conundrum Which once Religion solved, but she Has lost--has Science found?--the key.

What was snow-bearded Odin, trow, The mighty hunter long ago, Whose horn and hounds the peasant hears Still when the Northlights shake their spears?

Science hath answers twain, I've heard; Choose which you will, nor hope a third; 90 Whichever box the truth be stowed in, There's not a sliver left of Odin.

Either he was a pinchbrowed thing, With scarcely wit a stone to fling, A creature both in size and shape Nearer than we are to the ape, Who hung sublime with brat and spouse By tail prehensile from the boughs, And, happier than his maimed descendants, The culture-curtailed _in_dependents, 100 Could pluck his cherries with both paws, And stuff with both his big-boned jaws; Or else the core his name enveloped Was from a solar myth developed, Which, hunted to its primal shoot, Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root, Thereby to instant death explaining The little poetry remaining.

Try it with Zeus, 'tis just the same; The thing evades, we hug a name; 110 Nay, scarcely that,--perhaps a vapor Born of some atmospheric caper.

All Lempriere's fables blur together In cloudy symbols of the weather, And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas But to ill.u.s.trate such hypotheses.

With years enough behind his back, Lincoln will take the selfsame track, And prove, hulled fairly to the cob, A mere vagary of Old Prob. 120 Give the right man a solar myth, And he'll confute the sun therewith.

They make things admirably plain, But one hard question _will_ remain: If one hypothesis you lose, Another in its place you choose, But, your faith gone, O man and brother, Whose shop shall furnish you another?

One that will wash, I mean, and wear, And wrap us warmly from despair? 130 While they are clearing up our puzzles, And clapping prophylactic muzzles On the Actaeon's hounds that sniff Our devious track through But and If, Would they'd explain away the Devil And other facts that won't keep level, But rise beneath our feet or fail, A reeling ship's deck in a gale!

G.o.d vanished long ago, iwis, A mere subjective synthesis; 140 A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears, Too homely for us pretty dears, Who want one that conviction carries, Last make of London or of Paris.

He gone, I felt a moment's spasm, But calmed myself, with Protoplasm, A finer name, and, what is more, As enigmatic as before; Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease Minds caught in the Symplegades 150 Of soul and sense, life's two conditions, Each baffled with its own omniscience.

The men who labor to revise Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise, And print it without foolish qualms Instead of G.o.d in David's psalms: Noll had been more effective far Could he have shouted at Dunbar, 'Rise, Protoplasm!' No dourest Scot Had waited for another shot. 160

And yet I frankly must confess A secret unforgivingness, And shudder at the saving chrism Whose best New Birth is Pessimism; My soul--I mean the bit of phosphorus That fills the place of what that was for us-- Can't bid its inward bores defiance With the new nursery-tales of science.

What profits me, though doubt by doubt, As nail by nail, be driven out, 170 When every new one, like the last, Still holds my coffin-lid as fast?

Would I find thought a moment's truce, Give me the young world's Mother Goose With life and joy in every limb, The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!

Our dear and admirable Huxley Cannot explain to me why ducks lay, Or, rather, how into their eggs Blunder potential wings and legs 180 With will to move them and decide Whether in air or lymph to glide.

Who gets a hair's-breadth on by showing That Something Else set all agoing?

Farther and farther back we push From Moses and his burning bush; Cry, 'Art Thou there?' Above, below, All Nature mutters _yes_ and _no!_ 'Tis the old answer: we're agreed Being from Being must proceed, 190 Life be Life's source. I might as well Obey the meeting-house's bell, And listen while Old Hundred pours Forth through the summer-opened doors, From old and young. I hear it yet, Swelled by ba.s.s-viol and clarinet, While the gray minister, with face Radiant, let loose his n.o.ble ba.s.s.

If Heaven it reached not, yet its roll Waked all the echoes of the soul, 200 And in it many a life found wings To soar away from sordid things.

Church gone and singers too, the song Sings to me voiceless all night long, Till my soul beckons me afar, Glowing and trembling like a star.

Will any scientific touch With my worn strings achieve as much?

I don't object, not I, to know My sires were monkeys, if 'twas so; 210 I touch my ear's collusive tip And own the poor-relationship.

That apes of various shapes and sizes Contained their germs that all the prizes Of senate, pulpit, camp, and bar win May give us hopes that sweeten Darwin.

Who knows but from our loins may spring (Long hence) some winged sweet-throated thing As much superior to us As we to Cynocephalus? 220

This is consoling, but, alas, It wipes no dimness from the gla.s.s Where I am flattening my poor nose, In hope to see beyond my toes, Though I accept my pedigree, Yet where, pray tell me, is the key That should unlock a private door To the Great Mystery, such no more?

Each offers his, but one nor all Are much persuasive with the wall 230 That rises now as long ago, Between I wonder and I know, Nor will vouchsafe a pin-hole peep At the veiled Isis in its keep.

Where is no door, I but produce My key to find it of no use.

Yet better keep it, after all, Since Nature's economical, And who can tell but some fine day (If it occur to her) she may, 240 In her good-will to you and me, _Make_ door and lock to match the key?

TEMPORA MUTANTUR

The world turns mild; democracy, they say, Rounds the sharp k.n.o.bs of character away, And no great harm, unless at grave expense Of what needs edge of proof, the moral sense; For man or race is on the downward path Whose fibre grows too soft for honest wrath, And there's a subtle influence that springs From words to modify our sense of things.

A plain distinction grows obscure of late: Man, if he will, may pardon; but the State 10 Forgets its function if not fixed as Fate.

So thought our sires: a hundred years ago, If men were knaves, why, people called them so, And crime could see the prison-portal bend Its brow severe at no long vista's end.

In those days for plain things plain words would serve; Men had not learned to admire the graceful swerve Wherewith the aesthetic Nature's genial mood Makes public duty slope to private good; No muddled conscience raised the saving doubt; 20 A soldier proved unworthy was drummed out, An officer cashiered, a civil servant (No matter though his piety were fervent) Disgracefully dismissed, and through the land Each bore for life a stigma from the brand Whose far-heard hiss made others more averse To take the facile step from bad to worse.

The Ten Commandments had a meaning then, Felt in their bones by least considerate men, Because behind them Public Conscience stood, 30 And without wincing made their mandates good.

But now that 'Statesmanship' is just a way To dodge the primal curse and make it pay, Since office means a kind of patent drill To force an entrance to the Nation's till, And peculation something rather less Risky than if you spelt it with an _s_; Now that to steal by law is grown an art, Whom rogues the sires, their milder sons call smart, And 'slightly irregular' dilutes the shame 40 Of what had once a somewhat blunter name.

With generous curve we draw the moral line: Our swindlers are permitted to resign; Their guilt is wrapped in deferential names, And twenty sympathize for one that blames.

Add national disgrace to private crime, Confront mankind with brazen front sublime, Steal but enough, the world is un-severe,-- Tweed is a statesman, Fisk a financier; Invent a mine, and he--the Lord knows what; 50 Secure, at any rate, with what you've got.

The public servant who has stolen or lied, If called on, may resign with honest pride: As unjust favor put him in, why doubt Disfavor as unjust has turned him out?

Even it indicted, what is that but fudge To him who counted-in the elective judge?

Whitewashed, he quits the politician's strife At ease in mind, with pockets filled for life; His 'lady' glares with gems whose vulgar blaze 60 The poor man through his heightened taxes pays, Himself content if one huge Kohinoor Bulge from a shirt-front ampler than before, But not too candid, lest it haply tend To rouse suspicion of the People's Friend.