Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. NOTHING LESS THAN ALL, by EDWARD CARPENTER Poet's Biography First Line: All, all - and nothing less than all Last Line: And shall be content with nothing less than all. Subject(s): Identity; Self-satisfaction | ||||||||
ALL, alland nothing less than all. Ever men say: Here lies the truth, There lies the truthTake this, cast that asideThrow in thy lot with usWe are the wise, the rest are fools. But I am as one dumbI try to speak, to say what is in my mind, but words fail me. I go with these wise folk a little way, and then I draw back again; I throw in my lot with them, and then alas! I throw in with the fools. I stultify myself, and am like a thing of no shape. The fault is mine, that I cannot say what I want to sayI cannot for the life of me answer the questions that are continually being asked. Is it for pleasure and the world and the present, or for death and translation and spirituality, that we must live? Is it for asceticism and control, or for ingenuity and sweet enjoyment? Does the truth lie with the East or with the Westwith Buddhists and the followers of Lao Tsze, or with those who span seas and rivers by bridges and wing aerial flights by machinery? Is it best to be an idler or a worker, an accepted person or a criminal? Shall the town be my home, with its rush of interests and sympathies, its fascinations and magnetisms of the crowded pavements? Or the country, with its gracious solitude and the pure breath and beauty of the air and the fields? Shall I give my life (how gladly!) to my one, my only loverabsorbed, we two, our days, in single devotion to each other Or shall I pour it out upon a hundred and a thousand beautiful forms (so beautiful) to spread from them as in an ever-widening ring to others? Which is the most desirable or useful tradeto be a musician, or a geologist, or a navvy? to work laughing and joking with one's mates in a big workshop, or to walk at the plough-tail all day in the quiet landscape under the slow changes of the weather and the clouds? To be a mathematician tracking in one's study the hidden properties of curves and closed figures, or an astronomer noting the star-transits on which a nation's time-reckoning depends? To be a file-forger with hooved palm sweating before one's fire in summer, or a cobbler cursing the brittleness of his wax in winter? Or a potter or a moulder or a parson or a prostitute or a town-councillor? Is it better to be surly and rude, or sympathetic and suave, to be quick-tempered or patient, hot-blooded or cold-blooded, 'cute or simple, moral or immoral? To join the society for the suppression of Vice, or to be one of the persons to be supprest? to be partial to drink, or to be a teetotaler? For the life of me I cannot answer all these questionsI acknowledge that I am a fool. Sometimes with this inability to take sides comes a strange terror of losing all outline, of losing my identity, my proper consciousness, everything; Till I think of the Present and the work I have actually to doand then comes relief; Then instantly everything is decidedone's place, and the part one has to playnor is there any doubt whatever about the next move. For the moment I am pledged to this or that Yet I feel that in the end I must accept all, And shall be content with nothing less than all. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SOCIAL SCIENCE' by THOMAS EDWARD BROWN FULFILMENT by FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS INVOCATION BY A SMALL BED by ALES DEBELJAK AS A MOULD FOR SOME FAIR FORM by EDWARD CARPENTER THE STUPID OLD BODY by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: AFTER LONG AGES by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 1 by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. A MILITARY BAND by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. AMONG THE FERNS by EDWARD CARPENTER TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. AS A WOMAN OF A MAN by EDWARD CARPENTER |
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