Classic Poem

My Father and My Childhood

As childhood is to fairies, fancies,
Briefness of thought, and of heart
Fast change from hot to cool —
A flickering purpose, wild, then weak,
First passion, then a fear and pouting
On clumsy fingers told, and spent
In clumsy shadows, petulances
Spread in swollen tear-mist:
By such uncertain tides
I lived those doubtful years a child —
When to be live was half-felt sting
Of destiny, and half-stirred sleep of chance.
That was the time of tales —
Rising of mind to fragmentary hours
And fleshward fall by night
To scarce roused sloth of self.

For which I took a fox to father.
From many grinning tales he came
Sorrowed to that lonely burrow
Where the snake my mother left me
Cruelly to find what world I might
To history in, to get my name of.
There came the fox my father,
Between the tales to ponder, speak
The gruff philosophies of foxes:
" All is mistrust and mischief,
Bestiality and bestial comfort.
Life is a threadbare fiction —
Large the holes and thin the patches.
The gainer is the loser;
For to gain is to gain wisdom,
And wisdom's riches are the monies
In which poverty is counted —
To know how poor, how less than full
The gaping treasuries of truth,
Where's lack, what's niggard, which the fattened lie."
Oh, famished fox-wit —
Hunger stanched with taste of hunger,
Shammed meals and cunning feints
And wily shifts to make one morrow more
Of failing fortune, duplication
Sour of sweets remembered sour.

Forth we went, this paternality
In careworn foxhood scrupulous
To teach the public pomp and private woes
Of social nature, crossed estate
Where reason's loud with nonsense
And nonsense soft with truth —
And I, droll pertinacity
To turn the random child-head round
In sphering wonder-habit
And step new-footed fervour
On whatever ground like books lay
To my learning docile, garrulous,
A world of self-blind pages,
Staring to be read.

Whether the misery more those tales
Through town and village scampering
With beggar-cry, to operatic heavens
From hoarse house-tops venting
Weather-vane conclusions, jangled morals,
Spasmed glees and glooms and thunders —
Or that from town to village countrywide
Homeless we stalked the straggling world,
Pursuing laws of change and sameness
To their momentary finish in
Equivocation's false repose —
Whether the plight more ours,
My father's, in his fox-despair
Driving that unlaughed laughter to hard grief,
A bigot brooding, fortitude
Of losses and mis-hoping,
And mine, in restive after-hope
Protracting death's impulsion of mere death
Till might be death-exceeding courage,
Perchance a love or loves to overreach
Time's mete of forwardness
And break with me the life-fast —
Or whether theirs more sorry burden,
That they built to heights and stretches
Direly not sufficing to be that
They climbed to, walked on, boasted
Sight-substantial, likely, thinkable,
Were countered in their caution
By stumblings, crumblings, mysteries
And mishaps disaccording
With their miserly assurance —

We did not make division
Between the world's calamitous revolving
And our sore travel with it
On roads toward starved renewal curved.
One bounden omen then the whole,
Community of presages
Not yet in strict dissemblance parted:
My mother's tears afall like leaves
The wind takes, not the earth,
Being upon the branch already dust;
My father's dour world-worrying,

The fabled fox into humaneness come
With stealthy nose and cynic tread
But smile less proud than anciently
When Time was less the common theme
And more the learned axiom;
The world's tossed mind, a ghost-sea
In dying deluge breaking
On all the secret shores of thought
Risen against Time's drowned horizon;
And I my living variance
From livingness, of death-kind
Live protagonist, whose mouth's " to-day"
With morrows folded in from morrows
Hung speechlessly enwrapped.

And was it childhood, then,
From snake to fox's patronage,
And tortured idling, twisted course
Between the hither-thither stagger
Of the universal doom-day?
But was not childhood ever thus?
A premonition trembling distant
On lips of language shy,
Fast futures there acrowd
And quieted with story-book retard —
Even as I those troubled times of father
To story took and, parrying conclusion,
My fair curls shadowed among tales,
Made Imminence a dream-hush
Whose vocal waking slept inside my own.