|
Blight
Give me truths;
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of If I knew
Only the herbs and of the wood,
,
Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds and murky quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,--
O, that were much,and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun
And planted world, and
Of their imperfect functions.
But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes.
Love not the
flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the Bowen,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were
men,
Were unitarians of the united
world,
And, wheretoever their clear
eye-beams fell,
They caught the
footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are
armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the
mine.
The injured elements say, 'Not
in us;'
And night and day, ocean and
continent,
Fire, plant and mineral
say, 'Not in us;'
And haughtily
return us stare for stare.
For we
invade them impiously for gain;
We
devastate them unreligiously,
And
coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is
due;
But the sweet affluence of love
and song,
The rich results of the
divine consents
Of man and earth, of
world beloved and lover,
The nectar
and ambrosia, are withheld;
And in
the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward
rind,
Turn pale and starve.
Therefore, to our sick eyes,
The
stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our
hay,
And nothing thrives to reach
its natural term;
And life, shorn of
its venerable length,
Even at its
greatest space is a defeat,
And dies
in anger that it was a dupe;
And, in
its highest noon and wantonness,
Is
early frugal, like a beggar's child;
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizer of ambition, checks its
hand,
Like Alpine cataracts frozen
as they leaped,
Chilled with a
miserly comparison
Of the toy's
purchase with the length of life.
 Criticism on "Blight"
|
