Spring and All Read Free Page A

stars, describing immense and microscopic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running without a stop for the millionth part of a seconduntil he is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs — In that majestic progress of life, that gives the exact impression of Phidias’ frizze, the men and beasts of which, though they seem of the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years — In that progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass of its movements — at last SPRING is approaching.
    In that colossal surge toward the finite and the capable life has now arrived for the second time at that exact moment when in the ages past the destruction of the species
Homo sapiens
occured.
    Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past — is approaching the end.
    Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW.
    I
    By the road to the contagious hospital
    under the surge of the blue
    mottled clouds driven from the
    northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
    waste of broad, muddy fields
    brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
    patches of standing water
    the scattering of tall trees
    All along the road the reddish
    purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
    stuff of bushes and small trees
    with dead, brown leaves under them
    leafless vines —

    Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
    dazed spring approaches —

    They enter the new world naked,
    cold, uncertain of all
    save that they enter. All about them
    the cold, familiar wind —
    Now the grass, tomorrow
    the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
    One by one objects are defined —
    It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
    But now the stark dignity of
    entrance — Still, the profound change
    has come upon then: rooted they
    grip down and begin to awaken
    II
    Pink confused with white
    flowers and flowers reversed
    take and spill the shaded flame
    darting it back
    into the lamp’s horn
    petals aslant darkened with mauve
    red where in whorls
    petal lays its glow upon petal
    round flamegreen throats

    petals radiant with transpiercing light
    contending
    above
    the leaves
    reaching up their modest green
    from the pot’s rim
    and there, wholly dark, the pot
    gay with rough moss.
    A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. There is nothing! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither? To what end? Each asks the other. Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail? Why are we here? Dora Marsden’s philosophic algebra. Everywhere men look into each other’s faces and ask the old unanswerable question: Whither? How? What? Why?
    At any rate, now at last spring is here!
    The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro.
    Strange recompense, in the depths of our despair at the unfathomable mist into which all mankind is plunging, a curious force awakens. It is HOPE long asleep, aroused once more. Wilson has taken an army of advisers and sailed for England. The ship has sunk. But the men are all good swimmers. They take the women on their shoulders and buoyed on by the inspiration of the moment they churn the free seas with their sinewey arms, like Ulysses, landing all along the European seaboard.
    Yes, hope has awakened once more in men’s hearts. It is the NEW! Let us go forward!
    The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of „ art”, takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass.

CHAPTER I
S AMUEL B UTLER
    The great English divine, Sam Butler, is shouting from a platform, warning us as we pass: There are two who can invent some extraordinary thing to one who