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Samuel Hoffenstein
You take a bath, and sit there bathing
In water cold, in water scathing;
You scrub till you're sans an epidermis.
And feel like a regular bathing Hermes.
You do not waste a single minute ;
The tub shows how you worked while in it;
You dry, and do some honest rooting
For such remarkable abluting: —
Well, a day goes by, or ten, or thirty.
And what thanks do you get? You're just as dirty!
The house that I write of, faces the north:
No sun ever seeks
Its six white columns,
The nine great windows of its face.
It fronts foursquare the winds.
Under the penthouse of the veranda roof,
The upper northern rooms
Gloom outwards mournfully.
Staring Ionic capitals
Peer in them:
Owl-like faces.
On winter nights
The wind, sidling round the corner,
Shoots upwards
With laughter.
The windows rattle as if some one were in them wishing to get out
My spirit is a captive bird
That beats against its cage all day,
Until its winging strength is whirred
Vainly away.
My spirit learns its impotence
Only when night has blurred its bars.
Wings seem a strange impertinence
Before the stars.
Of what avail the tardy showers,
To the famished summer flowers ?
All in vain the rain-drops cry,
Dead things never make reply.
Life's belated cup of bliss,
Woo the weary lips to kiss,
When the singing is a sigh.
Pulses quivering, to die.
The stone falls, the bird flies, the arrow goes home,
But we have no motion, we scatter like foam.
O, give me a song to sing for your sorrow,
A song that will lift, like a wave from the reef,
You and myself, that will fling like an arrow
My poor scattered words to the target of grief:
I want to forget, to remember no morrow,
To go with the petrel, to go with the leaf. . . .
We would fly with all things to the goal of their flying,
We would turn with all things to the magnetic star,
But we never can live, because of our dying,
And we never can be, for the things that we are.
We alone of all creatures — the stones more than we —
Have no end, no motion, no destiny.