Classic Poem

Richardson, Erik Follows, Reed and I
Were all comparing notes on our vacations
One evening after dinner. Richardson
Had been to Labrador on a coasting steamer
And run across a half a dozen whales
In the mating season. He has an eye for colour
And picturesque detail, his flashing ocean
And his superb, preoccupied great whales
Love-hunted into fighting, was a thing
I might not have forgotten, but — you'll see,
We'd something bigger even than his whales
To occupy us later on. Tom Reed
Had climbed Mount Everest and broken his leg,
And crawled and starved for near a week before
A searching party found him. I had been
Playing the miner for socialistic reasons,
And I thought I had a pretty tale to tell
Until I heard the others. I began,
A bit puffed up to start with, then came Reed,
Then Richardson, the last was Erik Follows.
I rather think he'd needed his vacation
More than the rest of us; he worked so hard.
A doctor can work himself down to bare nerves
If he's in love with his profession, and Follows
Cared more for his than any man I know.
An alienist has many leads to follow,
But Erik's leads all seemed to follow him;
They ran him down a dozen times a day
And even tracked him into his vacations.
That's why we'd left his tale until the last,
For he was sure to have encountered something.
He had; he showed it to us. A gate-legged table
Of old mahogany, as soft as skin,
The colour of maple-syrup, with slender legs,
And just a touch of brass to liven it —
The round-ringed handle of its one small drawer.
And out of this drawer it came, the amazing thing.
A little, pigskin-bound, octavo booklet,
Ruled for accounts, but kept for notes, it seemed.
Half of the pages were blank, the rest were scrawled
With a large, oafish sort of pencil-writing,
So blurred and rubbed, it hardly could be read.
But Follows had read it; you see it was a lead.
" Well? " — we all said, for we could see at once
That Follows had a clue which stretched away
From just this note-book. " Well " — he said at last,
" I took a little trip into the Berkshires
Last Autumn in my car. One afternoon
I chanced to pass a farm-house where an auction
Was being held, and went in just for fun.
It was a pretty place. A little brook
Nuzzled its way along a boggy meadow
Behind a barn with a ship weather-vane,
Which should have struck me, but somehow it didn't,
And, just beyond, one of those odd-shaped hills
You see in Hiroshige's prints ran up,
A slope of hemlocks, right into the sky.
The house was low and wide, with both its porches
So thickly covered with Virginia creeper
The lattice laths might have been creeper-stems.
The crimson of the leaves in the Autumn sunlight
Against the old white paint was strangely cheerful.
I liked the place at once; it seemed a shame
To scatter all the queer, comfortable old things
Had been there for so long. I stopped to look
A moment at the crowd, trampling the garden
And shuffling through the house, then I went in
And bought that table in a sort of pity
That all these things spread round were up for sale.
The old stock ended — it was the usual story —
Gone West, or dead, no one to keep the farm.
I bought the table, ordered it expressed,
Pondered the natural queries which an auction
Always arouses for a day or so,
And finished out my trip without adventure.
Without adventure, yes, that was to come.
It must have been at least two weeks before
I found a moment to unbox my table.
I set it up, dusted it, opened the leaves,
And in the drawer I found this diary;
For that is what it is, a diary.
There is no date, but I can tell you now
The notes were made in eighteen eighty-nine.
But I don't know who wrote them. There's no name;
And that, I think, I never shall discover.
The diary begins — I'll read it to you,
Just a few pages, and then tell the rest. "
He picked the book up from the table and read
Slowly and quietly, yet it rang my nerves
It was so still and horrible.
" My God!
Why have they sent me up here to the grass?
Sent me to live among the hateful grass!
The terrible, creeping, creeping, pitiless grass!
What is this thing, this gorging, endless thing,
Moving so slowly that it baffles sight,
But never stopping either night or day?
We mow it down, and in a week again
It covers all the place we have laid bare.
Man builds his roads through grass. With breaking toil,
With sweat and muscle-ache he forces his way
Across the earth. He shears the grasses down
And keeps them there with infinite stress of wheels,
But if he pauses in his travelling,
If for a space he rests, worn with fatigue,
The ravening grass has run across his paths
And choked them utterly away. Oh, God!
The chatter, chatter, chatter, of the grass!
I hear it in the night crying for men
To feed its vitals with their own. I see
It crawling toward this thin, unstable house,
Thrusting its clutching fingers through the boards,
Swallowing the poor weak flowers in their beds.
What is this house? A flimsy, man-made thing
Besieged on all sides by the gluttonous grass.
They speak of spears of grass, but I see bellies
Bellies which feed on man-blood; feet which suck
Entrails of human beings. I am mad,
Tortured to see this island of a house
Waiting to be engulfed. And they have sent
Me here for rest! Oh, Fools! Fools! I, alone —
The myriads of grass are more than I.
I cannot eat, for I will feed no grass.
I cannot sleep for listening to it drink
And fortify its waiting strength with dew.
They tell me to go sit upon the hill
Under the hemlocks where no grass can grow.
But do not trees themselves flourish on graves?
They laugh, the farmer and his sons, they do not think
Of the fat, waving grass that I have seen
In the churchyard. I often go to watch
How green, how wicked green, it grows just there.


Last night I heard a little quiet noise,
A wood-pecker noise, but very, very soft,
And it was in the middle of the night.
I listened for hours till the grey light came,
And then it stopped, and then at last I slept. "


The doctor paused, but not one of us spoke.
He turned some pages over and went on:
" I hear it now on almost every night
And all day long my head aches. Lack of sleep,
I know. And that is very bad, for when
I do not sleep, my hearing is so sharp
I very nearly catch the words they say,
The grasses. Only not quite, not quite; and this
Hearing and not is piercing my head through,
Burning it up with irons, hot and cold,
So that I break out in a chilly sweat.
The farmer's wife tells me I'm looking badly,
Should go out more. But that I will not do.
I never go out now. The grass is there.
I have no money; the town doctors saw
To that. " No care at all," they said, " just grow
As the grass grows." I laughed, oh, I did laugh!
And still they sent me here to rest. My ears!
My ears! They hurt with all the noise. The tapping
Is louder every night. It seems as though
It tried to drown the whimper of the grass,
But nothing can do that. And I can't go
Away, I have no money, not a cent.
I cannot walk, for I must walk through grass.
I've whittled bits of wood to stop my ears,
But, with them in, I think I hear the leaves
Of some dead tree stuttering out my name
In a ghoulish whisper. So I take them out.
The tapping is better, even the stealthy, licking
Murmur which comes from all that tide of grass.


I've found it out at last. I made them tell me.
I threatened them one evening with a knife,
And said I'd go to bed like a good boy
When once they'd told. It seems that, years ago,
Fifty years or a hundred, I don't remember,
An old sea-captain came up here to live.
He'd left the sea, and as his daughter was married
To the man who owned this place, they took him home
To die, whenever that might happen. But he
Was marvellously afraid of just this dying,
Because he felt like me about the grass.
He used to swear that it should never get him,
And begged his daughter to cast him in the sea.
But she, a decent, quiet woman, was shocked,
And he could never make her give her promise.
At length he hit upon a compromise
And made the two of them agree to it.
His coffin was to be slung from a high beam
Beneath the roof-peak of the barn, and left
To rot and crumble. When they'd given their words,
He had that vane I've often wondered at
Set up there on the barn, he liked to watch
The wind-flaws veer it round and round, he said,
And they were satisfied and never thought
Beyond his reason. But I know more than they.
I know he set it for a sign, a symbol,
A monument. He died at last quite happy
Believing he had overcome the grass.
Way up under the roof-peak swung the coffin,
And mostly folk forgot that it was there.
It gathered dust and cobwebs and grew dim,
You couldn't rightly see it when you looked,
For all the chaff and hayseed floating round
Made a kind of blur to any one below.
But, one day, many years after that time,
The farmer's son, going to feed the horses,
Heard a loud, intermittent sort of banging
Under the roof, and when he took the ladder
And climbed up there to see, he found a strap
Had given way, and the coffin hung head down
Suspended by the other, and there it teetered
To and fro with every gust of wind
When the barn-door was open. So he said
He'd fix it in the morning. But that night
He woke to hear a rap-tap-tapping, so like
A hammer — but that was a foolish thought,
He knew directly what the thing must be,
Some stanchion broken loose in the high wind.
It was a stormy night, so he decided
He'd leave the shutter, or whatever it was,
Until next day, and fell asleep again.
But in the morning, when he went to see
About the coffin, it was all nailed up
As firm as could be with a harness-strap.
They thought that very odd, they little knew
What men can do who have the fear of grass,
What fear can make men do although they're dead.
But I have found a hero I can worship.
Napoleon, Julius Caesar, what are these?
They never ruled the grass, it sucked them up
And drank their brains, and overscored their towns.
O rare and mighty Captain, here's my hand.
Mightier than all men have been before!
Dominant Master, even over grass!
Not by the accident of death at sea,
But by compelling force in your own soul
To be forever above these miles of grass,
As no one ever in the world has been.
I feel a leaping fervour to join my hand
With yours, to grasp your bony, brittle fingers
Unstained by grass-roots. To-morrow I will go
And offer sacrifices to your manes.
How soaring my thoughts are released at last
From all the demon grasses that have gnawed
At them these months past! Now I go to bed,
And I shall sleep to-night.

Oh, merciless God! The coffin is not there!
They tell me it crumbled many years ago,
And where the bones are no one knows. A jelly-fish
With oozing, pulpy brain, a worthless polype
Tossed in the air by a Devil-God for fun,
That's what I am, and have been, ever to think
One could cheat grass! The squirming, oily grass!
It waited, lapping round and round the walls
Of the old barn to catch him as he fell.
The terrible, blind grass, feeling its way
With little patting hands. Feeling its way
Slowly, horribly, over all mankind.
There is no safety anywhere at all
For any people. The clapboards of this house
Will peel off one by one, the floor will crack
And through the cracks will come the grinning grass.
My legs will find it stifling them in nets,
My open hands be shut with thongs of grass,
My mouth will hold its roots, my nose its heads,
And in my ears the clatter of its laughter
Will burst my brain and cleave my senseless skull.
I cannot wait and watch, the strain is fire
Stretching and shrivelling me till my bones twist
And drive their needle ends out through my flesh,
And all I see is blood struck through with green,
The bloated green of over-nourished grass.
You dastard God, who set this hideous thing
Upon us! Curse you! Curse you! And all this
Foul, beastly, eating Earth. You shall not have me,
I'll die before I'm eaten. I'll squeeze my hands
About my neck until my eyes spit out
And after them the blood which is my life.
I cannot do it, my fingers are too thin.
But I will find a way to strengthen them,
I'll think of nothing but how to find a way,
I'll kill myself with thinking — "
Follows stopped,
And closed the book. " That entry is the last, "
He said, quite simply, " but there's more to tell.
For I went back to Oakfield — that was the nearest
Village to the farm — and found a man
Who'd known the Crawfords in the eighteen eighties.
And when I asked him if they'd had a boarder,
He said, " Oh, yes, a poor demented fellow,
Sent up there for the quiet of the country."
He'd been there just about three months, he told me,
And then, one day when no one was about,
He'd hanged himself by an old harness-strap
To one of the barn beams. He said no more.
Perhaps he did not know about the coffin,
And clearly he knew nothing of the man.
I think I've learned a salutary lesson.
I might myself have been one of those doctors
Prescribing easily " Rest in the country."
But, all the same, I wish I'd had a chance
To try my hand. And even as I say it,
I realize what harpies science makes us.
I pity him profoundly — yet a case
Like his to perish on a harness-strap!
Good Lord, what brutes we are! And now let's talk
Of something cheerful. Richardson, your whales — "