Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE WANDERING LUNATIC MIND, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE WANDERING LUNATIC MIND, by                     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 whatever—it will have to follow you—it 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
image—terrified 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
fancies—the long legacy of ages of animal evolution;
Slipping out and going your own way into the Unseen—feeling with your
feet if necessary through the darkness—till 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.





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