The more the sensibilitist I am The more I seem to want my mountains wild; The way the wiry gang-boss liked the log-jam.[16] After he’d picked the lock and got it started, He dodged a log that lifted like an arm Against the sky to break his back for him, Then came in dancing, skipping, with his life Across the roar and chaos, and the words We saw him say along the zigzag journey Were doubtless as the words we heard him say On coming nearer: “Wasn’t she an _i_-deal Son-of-a-bitch? You bet she was an _i_-deal.” For all her mountains fall a little short, Her people not quite short enough for Art, She’s still New Hampshire, a most restful state. Lately in converse with a New York alec About the new school of the pseudo-phallic, I found myself in a close corner where I had to make an almost funny choice. “Choose you which you will be—a prude, or puke, Mewling and puking in the public arms.” “Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”[17] “But if you had to choose, which would you be?” I wouldn’t be a prude afraid of nature. I know a man who took a double axe And went alone against a grove of trees; But his heart failing him, he dropped the axe And ran for shelter quoting Matthew Arnold: “Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood; There’s been enough shed without shedding mine. Remember Birnam Wood! The wood’s in flux!” He had a special terror of the flux That showed itself in dendrophobia. The only decent tree had been to mill And educated into boards, he said. He knew too well for any earthly use The line where man leaves off and nature starts,[18] And never over-stepped it save in dreams. He stood on the safe side of the line talking; Which is sheer Matthew Arnoldism, The cult of one who owned himself “a foiled, Circuitous wanderer,” and “took dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.” Agreed in frowning on these improvised Altars the woods are full of nowadays, Again as in the days when Ahaz sinned By worship under green trees in the open. Scarcely a mile but that I come on one, A black-cheeked stone and stick of rain-washed charcoal. Even to say the groves were God’s first temples Comes too near to Ahaz’ sin for safety. Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred. But here is not a question of what’s sacred; Rather of what to face or run away from. I’d hate to be a runaway from nature. And neither would I choose to be a puke Who cares not what he does in company, And, when he can’t do anything, falls back On words, and tries his worst to make words speak Louder than actions, and sometimes achieves it. It seems a narrow choice the age insists on. How about being a good Greek, for instance? That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year. “Come, but this isn’t choosing—puke or prude?” Well, if I have to choose one or the other, I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer