LITMIR.BIZ

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to face with my soul-self, weighing my life at its worth;

      Wondering what I was made for, here in my last retreat.

      Last! Ah, yes, it’s the finish. Have ever you heard a man cry?

      (Sobs that rake him and rend him, right from the base of the chest.)

      That’s how I’ve cried, oh, so often; and now that my tears are dry,

      I sit in the desolate quiet and wait for the infinite Rest.

      Rest! Well, it’s restful around me; it’s quiet clean to the core

      The mountains pose in their ermine, in golden the hills are clad;

      The big, blue, silt-freighted Yukon seethes by my cabin door,

      And I think it’s only the river that keeps me from going mad.

      By day it’s a ruthless monster, a callous, insatiate thing,

      With oily bubble and eddy, with sudden swirling of breast;

      By night it’s a writhing Titan, sullenly murmuring,

      Ever and ever goaded, and ever crying for rest.

      It cries for its human tribute, but me it will never drown.

      I’ve learned the lore of my river; my river obeys me well.

      I hew and launch my cordwood, and raft it to Dawson town,

      Where wood means wine and women, and, incidentally, hell.

      Hell and the anguish thereafter. Here as I sit alone

      I’d give the life I have left me to lighten some load of care:

      (The bitterest part of the bitter is being denied to atone;

      Lips that have mocked at Heaven lend themselves ill to prayer.)

      Impotent as a beetle-pierced on the needle of Fate;

      A wretch in a cosmic death-cell, peaks for my prison bars;

      ’Whelmed by a world stupendous, lonely and listless I wait,

      Drowned in a sea of silence, strewn with confetti of stars.

      See! from far up the valley a rapier pierces the night,

      The white search-ray of a steamer. Swiftly, serenely it nears;

      A proud, white, alien presence, a glittering galley of light,

      Confident-poised, triumphant, freighted with hopes and fears.

      I look as one looks on a vision; I see it pulsating by;

      I glimpse joy-radiant faces; I hear the thresh of the wheel.

      Hoof-like my heart beats a moment; then silence swoops from the sky.

      Darkness is piled upon darkness. God only knows how I feel.

      Maybe you’ve seen me sometimes; maybe you’ve pitied me then —

      The lonely waif of the wood-camp, here by my cabin door.

      Some day you’ll look and see not; futile and outcast of men,

      I shall be far from your pity, resting forevermore.

      My life was a problem in ciphers, a wear and profitless sum.

      Slipshod and stupid I worked it, dazed by negation and doubt.

      Ciphers the total confronts me. Oh, Death, with thy moistened thumb,

      Stoop like a petulant schoolboy, wipe me forever out!

From Rhymes of a Rolling Stone

      A Rolling Stone

      There’s sunshine in the heart of me,

      My blood sings in the breeze;

      The mountains are a part of me,

      I’m fellow to the trees.

      My golden youth I’m squandering,

      Sun-libertine am I;

      A-wandering, a-wandering,

      Until the day I die.

      I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,

      And I roomed in the cool of a cave;

      I have known, I will swear, in a new lifespan

      The fret and the sweat of a slave:

      For far over all that folks hold worth,

      There lives and there leaps in me

      A love of the lowly things of earth,

      And a passion to be free.

      To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,

      To range and to change at will;

      To mock at the mastership of man,

      To seek Adventure’s thrill.

      Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;

      To go my own sweet way;

      To reck not all what may befall,

      But to live and to love each day.

      To make my body a temple pure

      Wherein I dwell serene;

      To care for the things that shall endure,

      The simple, sweet and clean.

      To oust out envy and hate and rage,

      To breathe with no alarm;

      For Nature shall be my anchorage,

      And none shall do me harm.

      To shun all lures that debauch the soul,

      The orgied rites of the rich;

      To eat my crust as a rover must

      With the rough-neck down in the ditch.

      To trudge by his die whate’er betide;

      To share his fire at night;

      To call him friend to the long trail-end,

      And to read his heart aright.

      To scorn all strife, and to view all life

      With the curious eyes of a child;

      From the plangent sea to the prairie,

      From the slum to the heart of the Wild.

      From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,

      From the vast to the greatly small;

      For I know that the whole for good is planned,

      And I want to see it all.

      To see it all, the wide world-way,

      From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;

      With never a one to say me nay,

      And none to cramp my soul.

      In belly-pinch I will pay the price,

      But God! let me be free;

      For once I know in the long ago,

      They made a slave of me.

      In a flannel shirt from earth’s clean dirt,

      Here, pal, is my calloused hand!

      Oh, I love each day as a rover may,

      Nor seek to understand.

      To enjoy is good enough for me;

      The gypsy of God am I;

      Then here’s a hail to each flaring dawn!

      And here’s a cheer to the night that’s gone!

      And may I go a-roaming on

      Until the day I die!

      Then

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