No More Learning

Night on the prairies.
The supper is over--the fire on the ground burns low;
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapped in their blankets;
I walk by myself--I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never
realised before.

Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death, and test propositions.

How plenteous! How spiritual! How _resume_!
The same Old Man and Soul--the same old aspirations, and the same content.


2.

I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not day
exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around
me myriads of other globes.

Now, while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me, I will measure
myself by them:
And now, touched with the lives of other globes, arrived as far along as
those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or passed on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.


3.

O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me-as the day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.



_ELEMENTAL DRIFTS. _


1.

Elemental drifts!
O I wish I could impress others as you and the waves have just been
impressing me.

As I ebbed with an ebb of the ocean of life,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walked where the sea-ripples wash you, Paumanok,
Where they rustle up, hoarse and sibilant,
Where the fierce old Mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
I, musing, late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
Alone, held by this eternal self of me, out of the pride of which I have
uttered my poems,
Was seized by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
In the rim, the sediment, that stands for all the water and all the land of
the globe.

Fascinated, my eyes, reverting from the south, dropped, to follow those
slender winrows,
Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide;
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
Paumanok, there and then, as I thought the old thought of likenesses.
These you presented to me, you fish-shaped Island,
As I wended the shores I know,
As I walked with that eternal self of me, seeking types.


2.

As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wrecked,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify, at the utmost, a little washed-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, baulked, bent to the very earth,
Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that, amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me, I have not
once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my insolent poems, the real ME stands yet untouched,
untold, altogether unreached,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to all these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

Now I perceive I have not understood anything--not a single object--and
that no man ever can.

I perceive Nature, here in sight of the sea, is taking advantage of me, to
dart upon me, and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.


3.

You oceans both! I close with you;
These little shreds shall indeed stand for all.

You friable shore, with trails of debris!
You fish-shaped Island! I take what is underfoot;
What is yours is mine, my father.

I too, Paumanok,
I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been washed on
your shores;
I too am but a trail of drift and debris,
I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped Island.