I feel all primal and savage to-day. I could eat and drink deep and love strong I could fight and exult and boast and be glad! I could tear out the life of a wild thing and laugh at it! I could crush into panting submission the breast of a woman A-stray from her tribe and her smoke-stained tent-door! I could glory in folly and fire and ruin, And race naked-limbed with the wind, And slink on the heels of my foes And dabble their blood on my brows-- For to-day I am sick of it all, This silent and orderly empty life, And I feel all savage again!
Black with a batter of mud Stippled with silvery pools Stands the pavement at the street-end; And the gutter snow is gone From cobble and runnelling curb; And no longer the ramping wind Is rattling the rusty signs; And moted and soft and misty Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets, And the home-bound crowds of the city Walk in a flood of gold.
And suddenly out of the dusk There comes the ancient question: Can it be that I have lived In earlier worlds unknown? Or is it that somewhere deep In this husk that men call Me Are kennelled a motley kin I never shall know or name,-- Are housed still querulous ghosts That sigh and awaken and move, And sleep once more?
I am only a note in the chorus, A leaf in the fluttering June, A wave on the deep. These things that I struggle to utter Have all been uttered before. In many another heart The selfsame song was born, The ancient ache endured, The timeless wonder faced, The unanswered question nursed, The resurgent hunger felt, And the eternal failure known!
But glad is the lip of its whisper; The wave, of its life; The leaf, of its lisp; And glad for its hour is my soul For its echo of godlier music, Its fragment of song!
The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill; In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard A group of girls are quietly gathering apples. Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all, And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad. There are no birds, And the goldenrod is gone. And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight; And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper, And all the world seems old!
I tire of these empty masks, These faces of city women That seem so vapid and well-controlled. I get tired of their guarded ways And their eyes that are always empty Of either passion or hate Or promise or love, And that seem to be old And are never young! I think of the homelier faces That I have seen, The vital and open faces In the by-ways of the world: A Polish girl who met Her lover one wintry morning Outside the gaol at Ossining; A lean young Slav violinist And the steerage women about him, Held by the sound of his music; A young and deep-bosomed Teuton Suckling her shawl-wrapped child On a grey stone bridge in Detmold; A group of girls from Ireland, Crowding the steps of a colonist-car And singing half-sadly together As their train rocked on and on Over the sun-bathed prairie; A mournful Calabrian mother Standing and staring out Past the mists of Ischia After a fading steamer; A Nautch girl held by a sailor Who'd taken a knife from her fingers But not the fire from her eyes; And a silent Sicilian mother Standing alone in the Marina Awaiting her boy who had been Long years away!-- These I remember! And of these I never tire!