beat him with a rod.
“Allah,” he cried, “thou seest what I got:
Thy servants bar me from the sacred spot.”
“Be comforted,” the Holy One replied;
“It is the only place where I am not.”
Two Socialists
Brand Whitlock sped from Hell through space,
To be remanded never—
For having such a saintly face,
Set free forever,
With due apology. He came
To a world so base and bestial
No tongue infernal spake its name—
No tongue celestial.
So foul it was that even He
Had cast it off Who made it:
Adrift in space, as on a sea,
No mooring stayed it.
That orb unclean, denied the aid
Of gravitation’s tether,
For centuries had blindly strayed—
Lost altogether!
The sun disdainfully declined
To light the villain planet,
And the whole universe combined
To curse and ban it.
The Thief Impenitent, his grim
Recusance unabated,
Was its sole occupant: for him
It was created.
For when the wretch was newly dead
’Twas thought Hell had not ample
Restraints to check the local spread
Of his example,
Nor apparatus that insured
A proper pang; though lately
The woes that he at first endured
Had softened greatly.
But still one fierce, vain longing he
Suffered, nor could o’ercome it—
The wish to sit in reverie
On Calvary’s summit.
Beneath that orb’s unjoyous sky
Brand Whitlock found the sinner.
Affinity!—the outer eye
Lit by the inner.
Said Whitlock: “Here my stay is brief;
Take, brother, ere we sever,
Thy pardon. Be a better thief
Henceforth forever.
“God gives me power to condone
All scalawags’ offending,
For the sweet faith that I have shown
In their amending.”
When so he’d said with solemn grace,
As was that good soul’s habit,
The Thief directly into space
Sprang like a rabbit!
(He might have left at any time
Had freedom been his passion,
For God had long forgot his crime.
Crime was the fashion.)
The Saint, resuming soon his flight,
Met him through chaos floating.
Three stolen post-holes that poor wight
Was gaily toting.
A Morning Fancy
I drifted (or I seemed to) in a boat
Upon the surface of a shoreless sea
Whereon no ship nor anything did float,
Save only the frail bark supporting me;
And that—it was so shadowy—seemed to be
Almost from out the subtle azure wrought
Of the great ocean underneath its keel;
And all that blue profound appeared as naught
But thicker sky, translucent to reveal,
Miles down, whatever through its spaces glided,
Or at the bottom traveled or abided.
Great cities there I saw; of rich and poor
The palace and the hovel; mountains, vales,
Forest and field; the desert and the moor;
Tombs of the good and wise who’d lived in jails;
Seas of denser fluid, white with sails
Pushed at by currents moving here and there
And sensible to sight above the flat
Of that opaquer deep. Ah, strange and fair
The nether world that I was gazing at
With beating heart from that exalted level,
And—lest I founder—trembling like the devil!
The cities all were populous: men swarmed
In public places—chattered, laughed and wept;
And savages their shining bodies warmed
At fires in primal woods. The wild beast leapt
Upon its prey and slew it as it slept.
Armies went forth to battle on the plain
So far, far down in that unfathomed deep
The living seemed as silent as the slain,
Nor even the widows could be heard to weep.
One might have thought their shaking was but laughter;
And, truly, most were married shortly after.
Above the wreckage of that silent fray
Strange fishes swam in circles, round and round—
Black, double-finned; and once a little way
A bubble rose and burst without a sound
And a man tumbled out upon the ground.
Lord! ’twas an eerie thing to drift apace
On that pellucid sea, beneath black skies
And o’er the heads of an undrowning race;
And when I woke I said—to her surprise
Who came with chocolate, for me to drink it:
“The atmosphere is deeper than you think it.”
From the regions of the Night,
Coming with recovered sight—
From the spell of darkness free,
What will Danenhower see?
He will see when he arrives,
Doctors taking human lives.
He will see a learned judge
Whose decision will not budge
Till both litigants are fleeced
And his palm is duly greased.
Lawyers he will see who fight
Day by day and night by night;
Never both upon a side,
Though their fees they still divide.
Preachers he will see who teach
That it is divine to preach—
That they fan a sacred fire
And are worthy of their hire.
He will see a trusted wife
Pride of some good husband’s life,
Enter at a certain door
And—but he will see no more.
He will see Good Templars reel—
See a prosecutor steal,
And a father beat his child.
He’ll perhaps see Oscar Wilde.
From the regions of the Night
Coming with recovered sight—
From the bliss of blindness free,
That’s what Danenhower’ll see.
Genius
What is the thing called Genius? One has said
’Tis general ability directed
Into a special channel. One, instead,
Proffers a definition much respected
By toiling dullards: genius, he explains,
Is infinite capacity for taking pains.
Max Nordau, seeing he has not the thing,
Has solemnly decided, with Lombroso,
That genius is degeneracy. Ring
The curtain down—the show is only so-so;
I’d rather see a dog-fight than sit out
This inconclusive definition-bout.
What, then, is genius? Faith, I’m only sure
That I am deep in doubt about the matter;
But this I think: of two in literature
He is the greater genius who’s the fatter.
’Twas in an age less prosperous that those
Were kings of thought who starved by verse and prose.
Lo! the lean rhapsodist whose soul surveys,
Ecstatic, his unprofitable vision,
Interprets it in cleanly speech; arrays
His jeweled words with scholarly precision!
Faith, he’s a dunce or he would never lack
The means to wedge his belly from his back.
’Twere passing easy to allay his pang
Had he the genius—that’s to say, the insight
Commercial. If he would but sing in slang
He’d earn the wherewithal to make his skin tight.
Genius (let’s now define the word afresh)
Is the capacity to take on flesh.
Spirit of Letters, hail! Thy reign is Now;
Thy ministers are gentlemen that waddle—
Children of light and leading who avow
They swap, for tallow, speech that’s
