Classic Poem

Now youth is devastated
And when I come home in the evening it seems to me that the brown-stone house is a windy tomb,
Cold, and creeping with a damp horror,
Silent with the unspeakable …

There is sickness in the house, and one must tread lightly in monstrous shadow …
My brothers and sisters are heavily sad at sight of me: they look at me reproachfully …
Evil must be in me, even as in the house our family lies under some ancient fate …

My dreams break, and my heart, as I come out of the blowing evening in the free streets …
To be nineteen, with one's spirit galloping the world on a wild horse,
Ambitious, passionate, in love,
And all life sexually dream-coloured,
And to have the ordeal of standing in silence before a sick mother,
Charged with her sickness,
And love and hate contending,
So that death even appears as a friendly escape,
It is so I share youth's struggle …

A pin-point of light in the dreary large shadow of room,
And my pale mother with a towel bound round her head …
I had promised to take my father's place …
There was nothing in the bond that spoke of my falling in love with a young girl,
Nothing in the bond saying I should seek a life of my own …

And so my mother and I are ending the great primeval duel together;
Shall the future live for the past, or the past go down in sacrifice under young feet?
Shall I live her life or my own?
May I blame her for her love and need of me,
Or blame myself for the cruel new life that kills old loves?

I love her for all that has passed:
I hate her for all that must be:
In a weakness of love I grow hard and icy and aloof
Instinctively fighting the first great battle of youth …

She has met the inexorable: not I, but youth,
And in impotence before it, sickens, and thinks it is I:
I am blood-curdled with my own impersonal cruelty …

This is killing her, she gasps … and I half believe it . .
I go angry to my room, and lock myself in …

Soon the house will be broken up: I shall go down to the West Side Settlement,
And know the first naked loneliness of my life …
The hot warmth of a big family shall be taken from me …
I shall feel very little and bitter cut off from the source and nest of my existence.