Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. IN THE DRAWING ROOMS, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. IN THE DRAWING ROOMS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: In the drawing-rooms I saw scarce one that seemed at ease
Last Line: Own life for them.
Subject(s): Depression, Mental; Men; Poetry & Poets; Mentally Depressed; Mental Distress


IN the drawing-rooms I saw scarce one that seemed at ease;
They were half-averted sad anxious faces, impossible pompous faces,
drawling miowling faces, peaked faces well provided with blinkers,
And their owners kept standing first on one leg and then on the other.

I felt very depressed.
Wherever I went it was the same—it was like a nightmare—I could
not escape from it.
Ever the same miowls and drawls, the same half-averted sad uneasy looks,
the same immensely busy people doing really nothing, the same one-legged weary
idling, mutual boredom, and vampire business.
In the street I could not escape it—at the soirée, the lecture
room, the concert; I felt stifled; the sky above me was like lead, and the
earth—I could have lain on it and cried as a child,
For I felt like one deprived of his natural food, exhausted, and faint with
starvation.
[For indeed it is so, that man can not live by bread alone. This is the
silent decree of immortality whereby into his body are wrought for its
nourishment unseen intangible essences—of the faces of his fellows and of
the touch of their bodies and the breath of their lives about him. Which avenues
if they be shut—if the faces be like closed doors, and the hands be
withdrawn, and the breath of society about him be corrupt—a man shall
shrivel and die, as surely as an infant from its mother's breasts forbidden.]
And at the railway station, and in the train flying over field and river
through the dark, I could not escape that vampire horror.

Was this then the sum of life?
A grinning gibbering organisation of negations—a polite trap, and
circle of endlessly complaisant faces bowing you back from all reality!
Was it that men should give all their precious time and energy to the
plaiting of silken thongs and fetters innumerable—
To bina themselves prisoners—to condemn themselves to pick oakum of
the strands of real life for ever?
Was it mere delusion and bottomless nightmare? really at last the much
talked-of and speculated-about existence in two dimensions only?

And as I thought of the fields and rivers below me in the dark, returning
life thrilled in a faint wave of laughter through me from the beautiful bounding
earth;
And as a woman for the touch of a man,
So I cried in my soul even for the violence and outrage of Nature to
deliver me from this barrenness.

Well, as it happened just then—and as we stopped at a small
way-station—my eyes from their swoon-sleep opening encountered the grimy
and oil-besmeared figure of a stoker.
Close at my elbow on the foot-plate of his engine he was standing,
devouring bread and cheese,
And the firelight fell on him brightly as for a moment his eyes rested on
mine.

That was all. But it was enough.
The youthful face, yet so experienced and calm, was enough;
The quiet look, the straight untroubled unseeking eyes, resting upon
me—giving me without any ado the thing I needed.
[Indeed because they sought nothing and made no claim for themselves,
therefore it was that they gave me all.]

For in a moment I felt the sting and torrent of Reality.
The swift nights out in the rain I felt, and the great black sky overhead,
and the flashing of red and green lights in the forward distance,
The anxious straining for a glimpse sideways into the darkness—cap
tied tightly on—the dash of cold and wet above, the heat below:
All this I felt, as it had been myself.
The weird look of hedgerows and trees in the wild glare as we pass, the
straining and leaping of the engine, and the precious human freight madly borne
behind,
The great world reeling by, the rails and the ballast ribbon-like
unreeling—out of darkness arriving—phantasmal inexorable flawless!
[Stand firm, bridge of many arches while we pass swiftly over the tops of
the trees!
Hold, ties and struts and well-braced girders, hold while our iron feet
ring resounding over the river!
Hold firm, phantasmal world, even as thou dost—inexorably
firm—whether for good or evil, hold!]
O the mad play!
And the dumb sense of tension when wife or sister or friend is one of the
precious freight;
And the long hours of unremitted watchfulness, and the faithful unremitting
service of the machinery;
And the faithful responsive wheeling of the stars, ful-filling the hours,
The slow lifting of the Moon through the clouds, the changes of light, west
and east,
And the breaking of the morning.

All these in his eyes who stood there, lusty with well-knit loins,
devouring bread and cheese—all these and something more:
Nature standing supreme and immensely indifferent in that man, yet
condensed and prompt for decisive action:
True eyes, true interpreters, striking as a man wielding a sledge strikes,
in whom long practice has ensured the absolute consent of all his muscles!
True eyes, true interpreters—of abounding gifts fre givers—
Without wrigglings and contortions, without egotist embarrassments,
grimaces, innuendos,
Without constraint and without stint, free!
O eyes, O face, how in that moment without any ado you gave me all!
How in a moment the whole vampire brood of flat paralytic faces fled away,
and you gave me back the great breasts of Nature, when I was rejected of others
and like to die of starvation.
I do not forget.
It is not a little thing—though you passed away so quickly and were
wholly unconscious of it.

It is not a little thing, you—wherever you are—following the
plough, or clinging with your feet to the wet rigging, or nursing your babe
through the long day when your husband is absent, or preparing supper for his
return, or you on the foot-plate of your engine—
Who stand mediating there against Necessity, wringing favors and a little
respite for your fellows, translating the laws for them, making a channel for
the forces;
In whom through faithful use, through long patient and loyal exercise the
channels have become clean—
[Clean and free the channels of your soul, though your body be smirched and
oily—]
It is not a little thing that by such a life your face should become as a
lantern of strength to men;
That wherever you go they should rise up stronger to the battle, and go
forth with good courage.
Nay, it is very great.

I do not forget.
Indeed I worship none more than I worship you and uch as you,
Who are no god sitting upon a jasper throne,
But the same toiling in disguise among the children of men and giving your
own life for them.





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