Classic Poem

SYBIL , TO HER C OUNSEL

May you come in? Yes, and all the world.
Now that I know the truth about my shame,
How it is worse than mine, prison will serve
As well as any place to hide it in —
Unless you happen to have a drop of poison
To butter my bread with; and you haven't:
That must be churned, here, out of my heart.
How old am I? ... You must know? ... Thirty,
What was my mode of life — and where lived?
A word will answer that, one amorous word
Sipped lusciously from books by you and all men
With keen, secret, orgiastic pleasure:
I 've been since twenty-one a courtesan,
Sunk, at last, to the streets, and so here...
Though now that I know why, I don't care:
My own image was not upon my soul,
Nor was my own flesh upon my body: ...
So if the jury you appear before,
You who want me too, like all the rest,
As I can see ... having so often hunted
The jungle eyes of men for the least stir
Of passion, the least thought of my breast's softness
Or limbs' whiteness ... if, I say, the jury ...
But that 's no matter ... that nor anything ...
Not even in the end who the judge is —
Unless you get God — changing the venue,
If that 's your legal slang, from earth to Heaven:
For none but God can judge the tangled growths
Sprung from the seeds heredity has sown
So blightingly across the generations;
Nor will remembering, as your eyes so plainly
And patiently remind me now to do,
That twelve talesmen will file into a box,
And not archangels, on my day of judgment,
Change matters. For I do. But now that I know
Why I have been a harlot, why my body
Has never tended the " vestal shrine of virtue,"
All else is as the futile weight of nothing.
Yes, and, notwithstanding that, I see
How you, the appointed " counsel for the defence,"
And handsome too with the flush of yearning on you,
Would give — like many another who has craved
The scarlet I have but inherited —
All flowers of earth for this red one of Hell.
Yes, I say ... and yet if I 'm alluring
Still ... it is only for what I have been,
I and my kind, since the first lover's thought
Strayed to a " strange woman." ... So if your jury,
Forgetting that, let their eyes slip down
My body, instead of straight into my heart,
They too, desiring, will no doubt accuse
My beauty, that no longer means enticement,
Of having sought even to seduce Justice.
And meanwhile I shall know that in my breast
Only one thought is breathing — with a despair
That is beyond all bitterness: the thought
That lust was my dead mother's wanton trade,
Ere I, too, was born a mistress of it,
And that there are no innocent or guilty
Anywhere in the universe, but only
The chain-gang of heredity, bound together
By the helpless sin of all, and tramping the prison
Or highways of life — inescapably.
I shall know this, I say, or if it be
Not so, then God forgive me — or, if He must,
Punish me for each one of all the sins
But one I am guiltless of — bearing children.