3
" I measure every Grief I meetWith narrow, probing, Eyes;I wonder if It weighs like Mine,Or has an Easier size. I wonder if They bore it long,Or did it just begin?I could not tell the Date of Mine, It feels so old a pain. I wonder if it hurts to live,And if They have to try,And whether, could They choose between, It would not be, to die. I note that Some -- gone patient long --At length, renew their smile.An imitation of a LightThat has so little Oil. I wonder if when Years have piled,Some Thousands -- on the Harm Of early hurt -- if such a lapseCould give them any Balm; Or would they go on aching stillThrough Centuries above,Enlightened to a larger PainBy Contrast with the Love. The Grieved are many, I am told;The reason deeper lies, --Death is but oneand comes but once,And only nails the eyes. There's Grief of Want and Grief of Cold, --A sort they call " Despair" ;There's Banishment from native Eyes,In sight of Native Air. And though I may not guess the kindCorrectly, yet to meA piercing Comfort it affordsIn passing Calvary, To note the fashions of the Cross,And how they're mostly worn,Still fascinated to presumeThat Some are like My Own. "
17
" This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult " outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his " little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself. "
