Classic Poem

The Bible and the other books—
The books, beginning with the Bible,
Ending with the Bible which the Bible
In its fear of words, the word, was not:
These courages and volubilities
Adorn the speech of the world
And populate the minds of the world,
But hearts are fugitive and dumb.
In hearts and houses silence and old fear
Wall us apart, though in the flowing streets
Our language boasts the universal bond.
We do not love ourselves.
We do not love the word, the words.

To what shall I exhort you?
If it be love, you'll fly to bed again
And emulate the beast in that dead language,
Crying the name of your mate, which the beast could not.
If it be books, you'll read one, borrow one,
Or, bolder yet, go write one.
To such efforts of mind or flesh
You need no exhortation.

What then?
Why do I soften to exhort
Where I scorn?

I do not scorn.
I do not exhort.
This brings you bitterly
Farewell from Hope, my sweeter twin.
More frail, she died, recently though.
Forgive my grief's division,
Between her and you.
It seems to me you died then too.

Farewell from Hope to you,
Farewell perhaps from you to you.
Much has departed and will yet depart,
But I shall stay like doting grief
Among the crowded absences
And to the last lone living word
Mean ‘we’ when ‘I’ upon my page
Throbs in immense solitude
Between each hollow house and the nations' noise.

I exhort myself.
To love?
A little less of it, I think,
Would cool the anger in my grief.
To better faith in book-faith?
Leave me to my unimploring lines.
They are not lachrymose,
Need not the ecclesiastic kerchief
Nor that refreshing vinegar of pride
The persecuted love to wet their lips with.
I exhort myself merely
To continue with me.
It is a cruel career,
But one at least must not depart,
And I am happy in
Superior ways of suffering,
So that I do not suffer,
Only know.
I do not exhort you to know.
Even, I exhort you to go
If staying seems more valedictory—
The Bible and the other books beneath your arms,
Safe in your reading from all knowledge-harms.