_The Smart Set_ _Edwin Davies Schoonmaker_ WE DEAD When from the brooding home, The silent, immemorial love-house, The belovèd body of the mother in her travail, Naked, the little one comes and wails at the world’s bleak weather, We say that on earth and to us a child has been born. But now we move with unhalting pace toward the dark evening, And toward the cold, lengthening shadow, And quick we avert our fearful eyes from the strange event, The burial and the bourne, That leaving home, the end--death. Are these, then, birth and death? Does the cut of a cord bring life, and dust to dust expunge it? If so, what are we, then, we dead? For, in the cities, And dark on the lonely farms, and waifs on the ocean, As a harrying of wind, as an eddying of dust, We dead, in our soft, shining bodies that are combed and are kissed, Are ghosts fleeing from the inescapable hell of ourselves. We are even as beetles skating over the waters of our own darkness; Even as beetles, darting and restless, But the depths dark and void-- We have found no peace, no peace, though our engines are crafty. What avail wings to the flier in the skies While his dead soul, like an anchor, drags on the earth? And what avails lightning darting a man’s voice, linking the cities, While in the booth he is the same varnished clod, And his soul flies not after? And what avails it that the body of man has waxed mammoth, Limbed with the lightning and the stream, While his spirit remains a torment and a trifle, And, gaining the world, profits nothing? Self-murdered, self-slain, the dead cumber the earth; And how did they die? A boy was born in the pouring radiance of creative magic; And with pulses of music he was born. Of himself he might have been shaping a song-wingèd poet; But he was afraid. He feared the gaunt garret of starvation and the lonely years in his soul’s desert, And he feared to be a jest and a fool before his friends. Now he clerks, the slave, And the magic is slimed with disastrous opiates of the night. A girl was bathed with the lissome beauty of the seeker of love, The call of the animals one to another in the spring, The desire of the captive woman in her heart, as she ran and leaped on the hills; But the imprisoned beast’s cry terrified her as she looked out over the love-quiet of the modern world. Yet she desired to take this man-lure and release it into loveliness, Become a dancer, lulling with witchcraft of her young body the fevered world. But, no, her mother spied here a wickedness, Shamefully she submitted, making a smoldering inferno of the hidden nymph in her soul, And so died.