Classic Poem

What sonneteer, culling his rhymes to twist
Chaplets for love or death, would not draw back,
Outraged that I besing the Phobiac —
And " bizarre theme, and sanctioned by no list
Of themes yet indexed by anthologist, "
Aver reviewers. And my friends: " You lack
A just reserve; don't empty out the sack
Of private ails, self-pitying egotist. "
Three brief replies: the form my message takes
Grows not from mode but from my nature's need,
And what most haunts and hounds the artist makes
That artist's theme — though lip and tongue should bleed. —
As for a private ail — think you I pen
A diary? — I who am a thousand men?

The Phobic shapes of that one Terror come
Up from the underworld of mind: wild thought
Succeeding thought, — yet with fierce cunning wrought,
Self-wrought of one inveterate mother: some
Will harry when I hear a bell or drum,
Some with the thunder or the dark, but known
The longest those that grip me when alone
On heath, or hill, or highway, pale and dumb.
And Reason, still unshaken from her place,
And Senses, still as clear as moon or sky,
And Will and Strength of arm and foot and face,
Observe the Thing — and stand all helpless by!
And if I strive to jest It off, my laugh
Sounds like a craven cynic's epitaph.

And yet so alien that Mood (abhorred
By all my best of man), in earlier days
(Before we'd tracked the mind from maze to maze
Down to its dark abysses), priest or lord
Would verily have cloven me with a sword
Or whipped me to the dusty wastes, as one
Possessed by demons, — fatal, foul, undone —
Or bound me in a cavern with a cord.
Or but some paltry decades back, the wise —
An aunt, a family doctor, and a friend —
Would have obtained, with puzzled, tearful eyes,
A writ of court whereby a while to send
Me — (me of all men, toughest-braced in brain,
Through long endurance) — to house with the Insane.

And still the many-headed Ignorance
Stalks round me with its counsel; very grim
It is to hear its fat lips bluster: " Whim,
Sheer sulky whim, — why look you so askance? —
Have you seen goblins by a moor or manse,
Or borrowed coward legs of frog or hare? " —
Whilst in those wondrous clinics over there
Study the Viennese and men of France
The lore of such distress, — O friends afar
Unknowing me, high names that not to-day
Nor yet to-morrow (poems being what they are)
Shall sound in others' verse: upon my way
Ye light the helpless, Freud, Du Bois, Janet, —
For your deep books do cluster to a star,

A lode-star unto the supreme domain
Of selfhood in last triumph over self. . . .
I speak not, as a volume on the shelf,
Old platitudes: this triumph's not o'er pain,
O'er sin, o'er passion, o'er a grief in vain —
Though such I boast — but over what has grown
To have within myself a self its own,
And to defy my brain, by yet my brain.
'Twill be a triumph of a long campaign
Captained by science. Up from in me grew
This Monster Terror. Gain by subtle gain,
What thought long fostered thought shall yet subdue,
As night by night down in the mind's great deep
Thought sends its thought to rive it whilst I sleep.

What thought long fostered thought shall yet subdue,
As night by night down in the mind's great deep
Thought sends its thought to rive it whilst I sleep:
" Red Devil, I no longer shrink at you. "
Meantime by daylight is there work to do
On that same Devil; every hour to say:
" I am thy master; thou shalt pass away " —
Until some morn shall prove my Science true.
And when that morn shall come, as come it must,
And Life restores to me the golden key
And freedom of her City, I shall stand
Ever thereafter of the sons of dust,
Ever thereafter in that City, he
Most fit to guard her people and command.