Classic Poem

When I go home late at night,
After the store is closed, after the office is locked,
Footsore, soulsore, with treading the mill of the market,
Like a tired steersman letting go the wheel for awhile, resigning the ship to other hands,
The triumphs of the day as tasteless to me as the defeats of the day,
Getting the record well into the background and regarding it there with equable eyes,
Then I feel as if the little matters and the big matters no longer usurp each others' places,
Then I feel as if the misunderstood things are made plain and understood,
Then I feel as if my money no longer quarrels with my heart and comes to blows:
A great calm descends upon me: a strange beautiful conviction of content:
The sad questions are lost in the glad answer: the cruel journey is lost in the kind welcome:
Then all my brothers and sisters wherever they are on the earth take their equal place in my love.

The world of the night — the world of the revellers and the strayers:
The world of the night — the nocturnal freeground of the spirit:
The world of the night — the shadow, the veil: behind it the lifedrift
Do you ever beckon this faraway world through your own open door?
This is not the world of reputations or the world of saints,
This is not the world of the orderly or the world of the formal good:
This is the world of the homeless and the world of the derelicts:
This is my world — the world where my outcast comrades pay penance of pain for my desire,
This is the big world the little world forgets — the victim glory my victor shame unfolds:
The savior world of corruption, the redemptist world of crime:
This is the world soiled and illicit upon whose cross no aureole falls —
The world of men and women despised dear to me beyond the dearest forever
I go my pilgrim way: my staff is the surfeit of my love:
The newsboy sells me the morning paper asking: How are you, mister?
The policeman at the corner as I swing into view lifts his club in salute:
I catch up with a crowd of Dagoes just over, their packs on their backs: one of them nods to me:
A girl fair faced comes up to me curious to know if I dont want to go with her and have a good time —
(O God! how bad for both of us, equal innocents, that good time would be!)
I stop in the cafe: the waiter sweetens my lunch with priceless superfluous inquiries:
The conductor on the trolley tells me about his hard luck taking a try west and getting nothing to do,
The motorman whips up his speed a bit as he is late and is anxious for me to make my boat:
The ticket taker at the ferry says to me: You'll find it fine on the water this morning!
The deckhands come along after the boat is started and sit next me perhaps not saying a word:
So it goes: the dear nothings, the dear everythings, these and more too, treasured and inimitable:
I go my pilgrim way: my staff is the surfeit of my love

All these things are commonplace, but they are life:
They are not unusual, not dressed up, but they are life:
They are diversions in the general current, pools in the field, but they are life:
I would not like to miss any one of them, not the least of them:
I would rather miss the moonshine and the stars and the flowing river,
I would rather miss anything else than miss one of them:
They are more necessary to me than suns that give life,
For they go farther, they give supremer life, they give the life of lives:
For it is not the flame that lights the little fires, it is the little fires that make the flame:
Innocent as they seem of grandeur they are the passports of paradise:
The darling common greetings of the friendly world as I pass along,
The convincing final customary hellos and how do you dos as our paths for a moment meet:
The everyday man coming so close O so close to my everyday self in that flash of recognition

When I step out into the familiar streets in the dead of night with my live faith,
Greeting my sisters and brothers wilful unsubdued as they greet me with rudimentary signals:
Maybe a waif boy or girl touching my hand just for love's first and last sweet sake:
Then I know which of the world's goods I rate highest and would do the most for:
Then I know I would do the most for the ungarnished populace of the pavements,
As that mysterious reservoir of benefaction does the most for me —
With no glistening dazzling array of motives does the most for me:
Taking off my sickened soul the unbearable burden of its superiorities,
After all alienating ambitions leading me home to myself:
This bath of man washing me clean: this flush of love transfiguring the crowd:
When I go home late at night
Power is not rule — it is refusal of rule,
Power is not leadership — power is lost in the crowd:
Have you gone seed gathering among humble things?
Content to be out of sight, happy to be the hidden root?
The satisfied hand of some good deed withdrawn in the darkness?
Power is not in what you do but in what you refrain from doing:
Power does not subjugate, it invites:
Power is only irresistible when it stands pleading before those who could not resent it.