Mistress of the Night
Skinner, Margaret Hill
November 26, 1924 THE COMMONWEAL 67 to picture for us beasts, wise and witty like men, but whose...
...she said...
...I'd rather think you were simply hard up when you let them use your name...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...But sorrow is so beavy—so heavy, Sir," she said— "I only bear a memory, my child," said he...
...Which direction are you taking...
...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...
...An old man, a wise man and pitying," said he...
...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...
...Fill your arms with roses—with roses white and red, This, I wry for you is light as those may be...
...Let me take the sorrow and bear it in your stead, If only for a little way while you walk straight and free...
...M :—So it is...
...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...
...Who are you keeping step with me the day and night...
...C:—(deflandy) After all, why not...
...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...
...Was it that the warm body of the great orb held you closer than the marble dise just coming into its own...
...C :—Where are you now...
...Mistress of the N(ght TO-NIGHT you were far away...
...For suppose this life be indeed all...
...Your name's in it...
...You ought to read the book...
...MALOAREr HILL SKnrNBL...
...Exits...
...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...
...M :—.I must be going too...
...So turn awhile and rest with me in the hostelry that shelters youth and death...
...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...
...M :—Why not, indeed...
...A mask seems to fall from Civilization's face...
...For does not Lawrence "remind us that poets make a civilization...
...GErrar.inE CALLACHAN...
...Also your new friend Waldo Frank...
...That is something to which I can never reconcile my imagination...
...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...
...TnEonosrA GARRISON...
...Your eyes were turned to the setting sun and the rising moon held you not...
...M :—L'm quoting Seligmann on Lawrence...
...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...
...Trust me, I have carried many such," said he...
...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...
...C :—Wcll, I must be going...
...C:—I don't know...
...As his eyes look into mine for the first time this afternoon, I could swear the, are a little misty...
...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...
...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...
...C :—Sounds like my old friend Whitman...
Vol. 1 • November 1924 • No. 3
