To Pierrot (verse)
Callaghan, Gertrude
November 26, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL 67 to picture for us beasts, wise and witty like men, but whose...
...Trust me, I have carried many such," said he...
...For does not Lawrence "remind us that poets make a civilization...
...What poets shall make his songs, if not those who Circe-wise, charm him back to the uninhibited joys that lurk behind snout and muzzle...
...Then it is no longer the beasts of field and forest who are the disinherited and outcast, but Man—Man, of all created beings the most wretched...
...Who are you keeping step with me the day and night...
...MALOAREr HILL SKnrNBL...
...M :—L'm quoting Seligmann on Lawrence...
...M :—Why not, indeed...
...C :—Wcll, I must be going...
...Was it that the warm body of the great orb held you closer than the marble dise just coming into its own...
...A mask seems to fall from Civilization's face...
...But that your hand, Civilization, which built Chartres and Rheims out of the Neanderthal cavern, which leveled the harem to raise the home, which struck the chains from the slave and tore torture from the statute book, should be the hand pointing out for him the way down the Gadarene slope...
...November 26, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL 67 to picture for us beasts, wise and witty like men, but whose "tragi-comic Zoo," superseding the "delicately moralized affair" of the French writer, would interpret beasts for us in terms of our own repressed kinship, conveying "the sensation of the body observing, not with the rarefied ideas of the brain, but in its entirety, through skin and pores and limbs...
...What prophets shall he follow if not those whose rough sense can break the spell if only by heaving a dead cat through a church window, who will lay the ghost and save him from his own soul...
...So turn awhile and rest with me in the hostelry that shelters youth and death...
...An old man, a wise man and pitying," said he...
...C :—Where are you now...
...Exits...
...C:—I don't know...
...M :—.I must be going too...
...That is something to which I can never reconcile my imagination...
...M :—So it is...
...Time and Grief "My sorrow is so heavy that I may not turn my bead To see who walks this sunless road, this road of thorns with me...
...Also your new friend Waldo Frank...
...C:—(deflandy) After all, why not...
...I'd rather think you were simply hard up when you let them use your name...
...Tragic dupe of an outworn mystification, recoiling before phantoms of chastity and mercy that he has himself raised, turned back in his course from love hunt and prey hunt by precepts in which he no longer has any faith...
...Mistress of the N(ght TO-NIGHT you were far away...
...What if the immortality to whose hope mankind has immolated his desires and foregone his vengeances, be nothing save an uneasy dream from which, with cramped limbs and bemused brain, he is only now awakening...
...You seemed to linger in the warm glow of the day just passed and to shun the still, gray secret of the mistress of the night Don't you know you must zest awhile in her silver castle to greet that same lord on the morrow...
...No one else in all the world may carry it," she said...
...And you who saw the brave veil that I wear Rent into fragments, leaving me forlorn And naked in the whirlwind—only spare Me of your scorn...
...Put on again your mask as I my veil, And let me know the friendship of your hand, And be Pierrot the gay—I shall not fail To understand...
...Your eyes were turned to the setting sun and the rising moon held you not...
...For suppose this life be indeed all...
...To Pierrot I who saw fear tear away your mask Feel only pity—you are still Pierror The gay—what I have seen they need not ask, I shall not know...
...Fill your arms with roses—with roses white and red, This, I wry for you is light as those may be...
...As his eyes look into mine for the first time this afternoon, I could swear the, are a little misty...
...Civilization raps for his bilk) Strange carnal "paysagistes," for whom the whole world is sentient flesh that sweats and heaves, who see the sky "a drum of drawn white skin," a road "a great jugular, bleeding up the throat of the hill," for whom a beach is "the cheek of a god...
...C :—Sounds like my old friend Whitman...
...GErrar.inE CALLACHAN...
...You ought to read the book...
...But sorrow is so beavy—so heavy, Sir," she said— "I only bear a memory, my child," said he...
...she said...
...Which direction are you taking...
...TnEonosrA GARRISON...
...Let me take the sorrow and bear it in your stead, If only for a little way while you walk straight and free...
...Your name's in it...
...Mv sorrow that has cried so long is still upon your breast And I can hear the singing birds and lift my eyes and see Sun and foam of blossoms on the high hifl's crest," "See, your sorrow sleeps against my bean," said he...
Vol. 1 • November 1924 • No. 3
