Classic Poem

I have been wrestling with the shadows of Teachers—
Especially that bald-headed, blue-eyed, fierce, denunciatory little man,
Expert in ethics, the Moses of a new morality,
The powerful intellectual father of a small multitude …

I was just twenty, and as full of evil desire as a bad egg is full of badness,
And I spent a September in the mountains as this man's secretary …
The Devil! he out-Christed Christ. “Thou shalt not even think of sexuality” …
I was indeed in an old Jewish household, where the father rules and obedience is the first commandment …

But I say this man was powerful also in himself …
His intellect was like a mowing machine and his audience the helpless grass laid in swathes …
Experts came over the hills to tap his erudition …
He was self-disciplined so that you felt the pain and strength of it …
He was public-hearted, could be wonderfully simple and childlike,
Had depths of tenderness and touches of mystic warmness …

There he was, a giant of goodness and strength: the last of the Hebrews …
And there was I, wistful, lonesome, frail, be-clouded, weak,
A clumsy secretary, muffled in dreams, steeped in poetry …

I walked in sin: for I lusted after woman …
In sin: for I preferred loafing to toiling …
In sin: my nostrils ached for anarchy …

My sin was the mud that shining Virtue avoided …
And so I wallowed in it, thinking revolt brings freedom …
In the rain I walked through wild forests with a young woman,
And read my songs to her, and wrestled with her to see which one was strongest,
And felt like a devil …

Yet, all the time, he was stamping me with himself,
I was fluid silver, and he the great minting press that clamped an image on me …
Within three years thereafter I too became a shining Virtue,
And taught his ethics, and lived his morals …
And it took ten years of struggle to conquer that image …