Toward the Gulf Part 11

Then I bethought me of that aged man Who used to say, "Ah, mercy me," but answered: "Perhaps I am so happy when awake The song crops out in slumber--who can say?"

And Anne arose, began to keel the pot, But was she answered, Ben? Who know a woman?

To-morrow is my birthday. If I die, Slip out of this with Bacchus for a guide, What soul would interdict the poppied way?

Heroes may look the Monster down, a child Can wilt a lion, who is cowed to see Such bland unreckoning of his strength--but I, Having so greatly lived, would sink away Unknowing my departure. I have died A thousand times, and with a valiant soul Have drunk the cup, but why? In such a death To-morrow s.h.i.+nes and there's a place to lean.

But in this death that has no bottom to it, No bank beyond, no place to step, the soul Grows sick, and like a falling dream we shrink From that inane which gulfs us, without place For us to stand and see it.

Yet, dear Ben, This thing must be; that's what we live to know Out of long dreaming, saying that we know it.

As yeasty heroes in their braggart teens Spout learnedly of war, who never saw A cannon aimed. You drink too much to-day, Or get a scratch while turning Lucy's stile, And like a beast you sicken. Like a beast They cart you off. What matter if your thought Outsoared the Phoenix? Like a beast you rot.

Methinks that something wants our flesh, as we Hunger for flesh of beasts. But still to-morrow, To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace--O, Michael Drayton, Some end must be. But 'twixt the fear of ceasing And weariness of going on we lie Upon these thorns!

These several springs I find No new birth in the Spring. And yet in London I used to cry, "O, would I were in Stratford; It's April and the larks are singing now.

The flags are green along the Avon river; O, would I were a rambler in the fields.

This poor machine is racing to its wreck.

This grist of thought is endless, this old sorrow Sprouts, winds and crawls in London's darkness. Come Back to your landscape! Peradventure waits Some woman there who will make new the earth, And crown the spring with fire."

So back I come.

And the springs march before me, say, "Behold Here are we, and what would you, can you use us?

What good is air if lungs are out, or springs When the mind's flown so far away no spring, Nor loveliness of earth can call it back?

I tell you what it is: in early youth The life is in the loins; by thirty years It travels through the stomach to the lungs, And then we strut and crow. By forty years The fruit is swelling while the leaves are fresh.

By fifty years you're ripe, begin to rot.

At fifty-two, or fifty-five or sixty The life is in the seed--what's spring to you?

Puff! Puff! You are so winged and light you fly.

For every pa.s.sing zephyr, are blown off, And drifting, G.o.d knows where, cry out "tra-la,"

"Ah, mercy me," as it may happen you.

Puff! Puff! away you go!

Another drink?

Why, you may drown the earth with ale and I Will drain it like a sea. The more I drink The better I see that this is April time. ...

Ben! There is one Voice which says to everything: "Dream what you will, I'll make you bear your seed.

And, having borne, the sickle comes among ye And takes your stalk." The rich and sappy greens Of spring or June show life within the loins, And all the world is fair, for now the plant Can drink the level cup of flame where heaven Is poured full by the sun. But when the blossom Flutters its colors, then it takes the cup And waves the stalk aside. And having drunk The stalk to penury, then slumber comes With dreams of spring stored in the imprisoned germ, An old life and a new life all in one, A thing of memory and of prophecy, Of reminiscence, longing, hope and fear.

What has been ours is taken, what was ours Becomes entailed on our seed in the spring, Fees in possession and enjoyment too. ...

The thing is s.e.x, Ben. It is that which lives And dies in us, makes April and unmakes, And leaves a man like me at fifty-two, Finished but living, on the pinnacle Betwixt a death and birth, the earth consumed And heaven rolled up to eyes whose troubled glances Would shape again to something better--what?

Give me a woman, Ben, and I will pick Out of this April, by this larger art Of fifty-two, such songs as we have heard, Both you and I, when weltering in the clouds Of that eternity which comes in sleep, Or in the viewless spinning of the soul When most intense. The woman is somewhere, And that's what tortures, when I think this field So often gleaned could blossom once again If I could find her.

Well, as to my plays: I have not written out what I would write.

They have a thousand buds of finer flowering.

And over "Hamlet" hangs a teasing spirit As fine to that as sense is fine to flesh.

Good friends, my soul beats up its prisoned wings Against the ceiling of a vaster whorl And would break through and enter. But, fair friends, What strength in place of s.e.x shall steady me?

What is the motive of this higher mount?

What process in the making of myself-- The very fire, as it were, of my growth-- Shall furnish forth these writings by the way, As incident, expression of the nature Relumed for adding branches, twigs and leaves?...

Suppose I'd make a tragedy of this, Focus my fancied "Dante" to this theme, And leave my halfwrit "Sappho," which at best Is just another delving in the mine That gave me "Cleopatra" and the Sonnets?

If you have genius, write my tragedy, And call it "Shakespeare, Gentleman of Stratford,"

Who lost his soul amid a thousand souls, And had to live without it, yet live with it As wretched as the souls whose lives he lived.

Here is a play for you: Poor William Shakespeare, This moment growing drunk, the famous author Of certain sugared sonnets and some plays, With this machine too much to him, which started Some years ago, now cries him nay and runs Even when the house shakes and complains, "I fall, You shake me down, my timbers break apart.

Why, if an engine must go on like this The building should be stronger."

Or to mix, And by the mixing, unmix metaphors, No mortal man has blood enough for brains And stomach too, when the brain is never done With thinking and creating.

For you see, I pluck a flower, cut off a dragon's head-- Choose twixt these figures--lo, a dozen buds, A dozen heads out-crop. For every fancy, Play, sonnet, what you will, I write me out With thinking "Now I'm done," a hundred others Crowd up for voices, and, like twins unborn Kick and turn o'er for entrance to the world.

And I, poor fecund creature, who would rest, As 'twere from an importunate husband, fly To money-lending, farming, mulberry trees, Enclosing Welcombe fields, or idling hours In common talk with people like the Combes.

All this to get a heartiness, a hold On earth again, lest Heaven Hercules, Finding me strayed to mid-air, kicking heels Above the mountain tops, seize on my scruff And bear me off or strangle.

Good, my friends, The "Tempest" is as nothing to the voice That calls me to performance--what I know not.

I've planned an epic of the Asian wash Which slopped the star of Athens and put out, Which should all history a.n.a.lyze, and present A thousand notables in the guise of life, And show the ancient world and worlds to come To the last blade of thought and tiniest seed Of growth to be. With visions such as these My spirit turns in restless ecstacy, And this enslaved brain is master sponge, And sucks the blood of body, hands and feet.

While my poor spirit, like a b.u.t.terfly Gummed in its sh.e.l.l, beats its bedraggled wings, And cannot rise.

I'm cold, both hands and feet.

These three days past I have been cold, this hour I am warm in three days. G.o.d bless the ale.

G.o.d did do well to give us anodynes. ...

So now you know why I am much alone, And cannot fellow with Augustine Phillips, John Heminge, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, And do not have them here, dear ancient friends, Who grieve, no doubt, and wonder for changed love.

Love is not love which alters when it finds A change of heart, but mine has changed not, only I cannot be my old self. I blaspheme: I hunger for broiled fish, but fly the touch Of hands of flesh.

I am most pa.s.sionate, And long am used perplexities of love To bemoan and to bewail. And do you wonder, Seeing what I am, what my fate has been?

Well, hark you; Anne is sixty now, and I, A crater which erupts, look where she stands In lava wrinkles, eight years older than I am, As years go, but I am a youth afire While she is lean and slippered. It's a Fury Which takes me sometimes, makes my hands clutch out For virgins in their teens. O sullen fancy!

I want them not, I want the love which springs Like flame which blots the sun, where fuel of body Is piled in reckless generosity. ...

You are most learned, Ben, Greek and Latin know, And think me nature's child, scarce understand How much of physic, law, and ancient annals I have stored up by means of studious zeal.

But pa.s.s this by, and for the braggart breath Ensuing now say, "Will was in his cups, Potvaliant, boozed, corned, squiffy, obfuscated, c.r.a.pulous, inter pocula, or so forth.

Good sir, or so, or friend, or gentleman, According to the phrase or the addition Of man and country, on my honor, Shakespeare At Stratford, on the twenty-second of April, Year sixteen-sixteen of our Lord was merry-- Videlicet, was drunk." Well, where was I?-- Oh yes, at braggart breath, and now to say it: I believe and say it as I would lightly speak Of the most common thing to sense, outside Myself to touch or a.n.a.lyze, this mind Which has been used by Something, as I use A quill for writing, never in this world In the most high and palmy days of Greece, Or in this roaring age, has known its peer.

No soul as mine has lived, felt, suffered, dreamed, Broke open spirit secrets, followed trails Of pa.s.sions curious, countless lives explored As I have done. And what are Greek and Latin, The lore of Aristotle, Plato to this?

Since I know them by what I am, the essence From which their utterance came, myself a flower Of every graft and being in myself The recapitulation and the complex Of all the great. Were not brains before books?

And even geometries in some brain Before old Gutenberg? O fie, Ben Jonson, If I am nature's child am I not all?

Howe'er it be, ascribe this to the ale, And say that reason in me was a fume.

But if you honor me, as you have said, As much as any, this side idolatry, Think, Ben, of this: That I, whate'er I be In your regard, have come to fifty-two, Defeated in my love, who knew too well That poets through the love of women turn To satyrs or to G.o.ds, even as women By the first touch of pa.s.sion bloom or rot As angels or as bawds.

Bethink you also How I have felt, seen, known the mystic process Working in man's soul from the woman soul As part thereof in essence, spirit and flesh, Even as a malady may be, while this thing Is health and growth, and growing draws all life, All goodness, wisdom for its nutriment.

Till it become a vision paradisic, And a ladder of fire for climbing, from its topmost Rung a place for stepping into heaven. ...

This I have know, but had not. Nor have I Stood coolly off and seen the woman, used Her blood upon my palette. No, but heaven Commanded my strength's use to abort and slay What grew within me, while I saw the blood Of love untimely ripped, as 'twere a child Killed i' the womb, a harpy or an angel With my own blood stained.

As a virgin shamed By the swelling life unlicensed needles it, But empties not her womb of some last shred Of flesh which fouls the alleys of her body, And fills her wholesome nerves with poisoned sleep, And weakness to the last of life, so I For some shame not unlike, some need of life To rid me of this life I had conceived Did up and choke it too, and thence begot A fever and a fixed debility For killing that begot.

Now you see that I Have not grown from a central dream, but grown Despite a wound, and over the wound and used My flesh to heal my flesh. My love's a fever Which longed for that which nursed the malady, And fed on that which still preserved the ill, The uncertain, sickly appet.i.te to please.

My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept Has left me. And as reason is past care I am past cure, with ever more unrest Made frantic-mad, my thoughts as madmen's are, And my discourse at random from the truth, Not knowing what she is, who swore her fair And thought her bright, who is as black as h.e.l.l And dark as night.

But list, good gentlemen, This love I speak of is not as a cloak Which one may put away to wear a coat, And doff that for a jacket, like the loves We men are wont to have as loves or wives.

She is the very one, the soul of souls, And when you put her on you put on light, Or wear the robe of Nessus, poisonous fire, Which if you tear away you tear your life, And if you wear you fall to ashes. So 'Tis not her bed-vow broke, I have broke mine, That ruins me; 'tis honest faith quite lost, And broken hope that we could find each other, And that mean more to me and less to her.

'Tis that she could take all of me and leave me Without a sense of loss, without a tear, And make me fool and perjured for the oath That swore her fair and true. I feel myself As like a virgin who her body gives For love of one whose love she dreams is hers, But wakes to find herself a toy of blood, And dupe of prodigal breath, abandoned quite For other conquests. For I gave myself, And shrink for thought thereof, and for the loss Of myself never to myself restored.

The urtication of this shame made plays And sonnets, as you'll find behind all deeds That mount to greatness, anger, hate, disgust, But, better, love.

To h.e.l.l with punks and wenches, Drabs, mopsies, doxies, minxes, trulls and queans, Rips, harridans and strumpets, pieces, jades.

And likewise to the eternal bonfire lechers, All rakeh.e.l.ls, satyrs, goats and placket fumblers, Gibs, breakers-in-at-catch-doors, thunder tubes.

I think I have a fever--h.e.l.l and furies!

Or else this ale grows hotter i' the mouth.

Ben, if I die before you, let me waste Richly and freely in the good brown earth, Untrumpeted and by no bust marked out.

What good, Ben Jonson, if the world could see What face was mine, who wrote these plays and sonnets?

Life, you have hurt me. Since Death has a veil I take the veil and hide, and like great Caesar Who drew his toga round him, I depart.