The stalk to penury, then slumber comes With dreams of spring stored in the imprisoned germ, An old life and a new life all in one, A thing of memory and of prophecy, Of reminiscence, longing, hope and fear. What has been ours is taken, what was ours Becomes entailed on our seed in the spring, Fees in possession and enjoyment too. ... The thing is sex, Ben. It is that which lives And dies in us, makes April and unmakes, And leaves a man like me at fifty-two, Finished but living, on the pinnacle Betwixt a death and birth, the earth consumed And heaven rolled up to eyes whose troubled glances Would shape again to something better—what? Give me a woman, Ben, and I will pick Out of this April, by this larger art Of fifty-two, such songs as we have heard, Both you and I, when weltering in the clouds Of that eternity which comes in sleep, Or in the viewless spinning of the soul When most intense. The woman is somewhere, And that's what tortures, when I think this field So often gleaned could blossom once again If I could find her. Well, as to my plays: I have not written out what I would write. They have a thousand buds of finer flowering. And over "Hamlet" hangs a teasing spirit As fine to that as sense is fine to flesh. Good friends, my soul beats up its prisoned wings Against the ceiling of a vaster whorl And would break through and enter. But, fair friends, What strength in place of sex shall steady me? What is the motive of this higher mount? What process in the making of myself— The very fire, as it were, of my growth— Shall furnish forth these writings by the way, As incident, expression of the nature Relumed for adding branches, twigs and leaves?... Suppose I'd make a tragedy of this, Focus my fancied "Dante" to this theme, And leave my halfwrit "Sappho," which at best Is just another delving in the mine That gave me "Cleopatra" and the Sonnets? If you have genius, write my tragedy, And call it "Shakespeare, Gentleman of Stratford," Who lost his soul amid a thousand souls, And had to live without it, yet live with it As wretched as the souls whose lives he lived. Here is a play for you: Poor William Shakespeare, This moment growing drunk, the famous author Of certain sugared sonnets and some plays, With this machine too much to him, which started Some years ago, now cries him nay and runs Even when the house shakes and complains, "I fall, You shake me down, my timbers break apart. Why, if an engine must go on like this The building
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