Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE WANDERING LUNATIC MIND, by EDWARD CARPENTER Poet's Biography First Line: Do not pay too much attention to the wandering lunatic mind Last Line: For this were to give up your kingdom, and bow down your neck to death. Subject(s): Religion; Theology | ||||||||
DO not pay too much attention to the wandering lunatic Mind. When you have trained it, informed it, made it clear, decisive, and your flexible instrument and tool, Why, do not then reverse the order and become the mere fatuous attendant and exhibitor of its acrobatic feats (like a keeper who shows off a monkey). Remember that if you walk away from it, leaving it as dead, paying it no attention whateverit will have to follow youit will grow by following, by reaching up to you, from the known to the unknown, continually; It will become at last the rainbow-tinted garment and shining interpreter of Yourself, and incredibly beautiful. But if you turn and wait always upon it, and its idiotic cares and anxieties, and endless dream-chains of argument and imagination Feeding them and the microbe-swarms of thought continually, wasting upon them your life-force; Why, then, instead of your Mind becoming your true companion and interpreter, it will develop antics and a St. Vitus' dance of its own, and the form of a wandering lunatic, Incredibly tangle-haired and diseased and unclean, In whose features you, in sadness and in vain, will search for your own imageterrified lest you find it not, and terrified too lest you find it. Therefore quite decisively, day by day and at every juncture, leave your Mind for a time in silence and abeyance; With its tyrannous thoughts and demands, and funny little fears and fanciesthe long legacy of ages of animal evolution; Slipping out and going your own way into the Unseenfeeling with your feet if necessary through the darknesstill some day it may follow you; Absolutely determined not to be bound by any of its conclusions; or fossilized in any pattern that it may invent; For this were to give up your kingdom, and bow down your neck to Death. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MYSTIC BOUNCE by TERRANCE HAYES MATHEMATICS CONSIDERED AS A VICE by ANTHONY HECHT UNHOLY SONNET 11 by MARK JARMAN SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC by ROBINSON JEFFERS THE COMING OF THE PLAGUE by WELDON KEES A LITHUANIAN ELEGY by ROBERT KELLY AS A MOULD FOR SOME FAIR FORM by EDWARD CARPENTER |
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