XV.
Each century hath, it is said, its peculiar favorite sin,
A chamber of horrors so grewsome and dank no poet may dwell therein,
But the special crime of this passing day touches us all so near
We cannot therefrom withdraw our eyes however they widen with fear,—
The journals will spare no details of the suicide’s act and its cause,
The plunge or the bane or the bullet—Why may not the people have laws
To defend them from hearing these blasts of hell? O tribunes and senators! pause
In your framing dispensable edicts, smoothing scarce-visible flaws,
And forbid the monsters black-blooded and huge to mangle these gouts in their maws!
Saville heard her sentence of death, she felt, in hearing the surgeon say
The bandage should fall and the curtains be drawn on the first sweet morning of May,
A year ago—how the robins had sung!—it had been their wedding day!
When instinct of self-preservation is nulled and “life maddens ’gainst life amain,”
The very loss of that chief instinct is proof of a clot on the brain,
And it eats and honeycombs night and day like a burrowing mole in the ground,
Whether one dances or dines or sleeps, till a vital point it hath found,
And the deadliest sting of the subtle disease, the devil’s insidious touch
Is that though a temptation to mortal sin one knoweth it never for such,
But esteems it the highest duty to which a soul can aspire,
And is lighted to self-destruction by the martyr’s sacrific white fire,—
And how shall one fail to follow where the immolate saints have trod,
How shrink from inflicting upon one’s self the flagellant’s merited rod,
How fear to cast out mere offal—a burden so little worth
There no longer is room for it anywhere in all of the sweet wide earth?
Look you,—why, haply beneath your roof one weareth a steady smile,
Sedately pacing life’s minuet, while steadily all the while
A horrid design is forming, a fungus spreads cancerous-vile,—
I have held the hand of a friend one hour and the next his spirit had fled,
Dismissed by self and violent means—Who knows? Had I sisterly said
A word of love I might have dissolved and melted his purpose dread,—
Clasp close the near ones about your hearth, let never caresses lack,
For the turn of a card, the fall of a leaf, may speed them adown the track
Facile, declivitous, into the bourne of the Acheron valley black!
Yet no,—this were not of the least avail; no aid that is won from without
Is offeree to cope with interior foes, to vanquish and put them to rout,—
The brood ignoble and self-engendered must even self-stifled be,
For a wanton zephyr deracinates not the sturdiest forest tree,
And often this deadly virus breeds in a strong determinate mind,
In a soul more stalwart and loftier far than the bulk of the human kind,
Whose motive is not a coward’s, to spare itself woe and disgrace,
But to rid the world of a tainted thing, to die for the sake of the race.
Yet if so be that one conquers temptation and out of the gates of hell
Flame-blackened with shrivelling garments back cometh alive and well,
There’s not on the earth a stronger soul than such a king-spirit must be,
That hath even outdaunted Satan himself, bidding him tremble and flee,—
Nothing can shake the integrity, the rock’s impregnable strength
Of the fort long assaulted that now is left to its hard won peace at length,—
Exalted, serene, the spirit shall reign in its untouched citadel,
And look henceforth with an equal eye on the things of heaven or hell;
Less ineffable now is the heliotrope scent, and life seemeth scarcely so sweet,
But neither looms death so dragonish grim nor annihilate dark so complete,
For the soul that was but as a reed in the wind hath attained a Nirvana of calm,
And is in this feverous desert of life a fountain of healing and balm,
And pilgrims shall be refreshed thereat, shall gratefully lave and drink,
And maidens shall garlands wreathe of forget-me-nots fringing the brink,
And many shall love the spring fern-hidden, shall precious esteem it and dear,
Not knowing what throes volcanic and fierce have left it so crystalline clear.
