# Famous Single Poems/Waiting

WAITING
Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, or tide, or sea; I rave no more ’gainst Time or Fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.
I stay my haste, I make delays, For what avails this eager pace? I stand amid the eternal ways, And what is mine shall know my face.
Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me; No wind can drive my bark astray, Nor change the tide of destiny.
What matter if I stand alone? I wait with joy the coming years; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, And garner up its fruits of tears.
The waters know their own, and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure delights.
The stars come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave unto the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me.
John Burroughs.
WAITING
It is, of course, well known that the saddest poems are written by the youngest poets; that it is youth which breaks its heart over the tragedies of fate, which finds in life nothing but despair, which delights to muse upon death and even to sigh for it, and which has a generally gorgeous time playing with its emotions. It is only with age and experience that understanding comes, or at least a certain induration which enables one to defy more or less successfully fortune’s slings and arrows. Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis” at the mature age of eighteen; Keats’s first poem (at nineteen) was entitled “On Death,” and Lowell’s first one (at twenty) was a “Threnodia” with a refrain of “Nevermore!” as lugubrious as Poe’s.
Nevertheless, it is with something of a shock one learns, from the recently-published “John Burroughs Talks” of Mr. Clifton Johnson, that Burroughs’s one famous poem, “Waiting,” was written not as one might suppose in the ripe placidity of age, but in the year 1862 when its author was twenty-five years old.
Twenty-five does seem rather an early age ​at which to sit down and fold one’s hands and wait—at least to an American. To an Arab or a Hindu it would doubtless appeal as the wisest course of all; certainly it is the course recommended by all their saints and prophets—to devote oneself to contemplation in order to win through to that high serenity where the world and its stings seem petty and far away, to that Nirvana which is the supremest good the gods bestow on man.
As a matter of fact, that is exactly what Burroughs did, in so far as circumstance and environment permitted, and he seems to have been fairly successful in winning for himself a placid and happy life, with no great excitements, to be sure, no high and passionate experiences, but also with no greater annoyances than an occasional lack of money and a wife with a mania for cleaning house. Both of these irritations he escaped in his later years, for his writings brought him an income adequate to his simple needs, and he evaded his wife by building himself a cabin in the woods where, with an utter disregard of the neighborhood gossip, he could live by himself and be as untidy as he pleased.
The poem did, then, in a way, voice his inner convictions, though he himself points out that it was not so much the outgrowth of any spiritual experience or reasoned philosophy as of ​the religious beliefs which his parents fiercely held and which they had labored to impress upon him. Perhaps the real truth is that, as the years passed, he gradually grew up to it.
John Burroughs’s people were all what were commonly known as Hardshell Baptists—though they preferred to call themselves by the more dignified title of Primitive Baptists. Their principal dogma seems to have been that the Methodists, or Arminians as the Baptists loved to designate them, were headed straight for hell because they believed that everybody had a chance to get to heaven: faith and repentance being the only things necessary. Whereas the Hardshell Baptists were firm believers in predestination. If a man was meant to be saved, he would be saved no matter how bad he was; if he was meant to be damned, he would be damned no matter how good he was; and it was not only useless but unfair, once the Lord had settled these matters to His own satisfaction, to annoy Him with prayers and petitions in an effort to warp His will. This has always been the creed of good old fighting Christians such as the Calvinists and the Covenanters and the Puritans, and the Hardshell Baptists were also a militant people.
Burroughs had started his career as a wage earner at the age of seventeen. After a ​fragmentary education, he had secured a job as a teacher in a little red schoolhouse in the village of Tongore, New York. He received ten dollars a month and was boarded around among the families of his pupils. Eight years later, he was still teaching, having in the meantime acquired a wife, but nothing else worth mentioning.
By this time he had come to the very reasonable conclusion that he would never get anywhere as a teacher, and finally, as a possible solution of life’s difficulties, decided to become a doctor. He had no especial predilection for doctoring, but he thought he might be able to make a better living that way, so he began to read such books of medicine as the local practitioner happened to own. It is worth noting that he had not, as yet, developed any interest in that study of nature which was to occupy all his later years. He was just blindly groping around trying to find some way to earn enough money to support his wife decently. It was under these circumstances that “Waiting” was written. But let him tell the story.
“I wrote considerable poetry as a young man,” he says, “but the verse form of expression hampered my thought. Rhyme and rhythm never flowed through my mind easily. My poems seemed to me manufactured rather than spontaneous, and a time came when I wrote no ​more poetry and destroyed most of what I had done previously.
“Three of my early poems found their way into print. One of them was addressed to a friend who had been visiting me at the old farm. When he went away it left me kind of sentimental and lonesome, I suppose, and I put my feelings into verse. Another poem entitled ‘Loss and Gain’ came out in the Independent. ‘Waiting’ was the name I gave the third and that has become well known. I can’t say as much for any of the other verses I have written, either in my youth or later when I resumed writing poetry. So I am practically a man of a single poem.
“‘Waiting’ dates back to 1862, when I was twenty-five. I was not prospering, the outlook was anything but encouraging, and it was a very gloomy period of my life. Besides, the Civil War was raging; I was thinking I ought to join the army, but my wife was very much opposed to that, and so were my folks. I was teaching school at Olive in Ulster county and was reading medicine in the office of the village doctor with the notion of becoming a physician. One evening, as I sat in the little back room of the doctor’s office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote the poem, which begins:
“Serene, I fold my hands and wait.
“The theme of the poem accorded with the religious ideas of my people. They were Old School Baptists who believed in predestination, foreordination, and all that sort of thing. I inherited their feeling, but I wasn’t so theological. It took the shape with me that you see in the poem. It is predestination watered down, or watered up.
“‘Waiting’ was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, but it attracted no attention until, many years later, Whittier put it in his Songs of Three Centuries. Since then it has kept floating around and has won wide popularity. Every once in a while it makes a tour of the newspapers. Sometimes they give it a new title, or drop my name, or change lines, or add verses, or subtract them. Recently the Congregationalist printed it under the title ‘Serenity’ and credited it to the British Weekly. In the usual version there is one less verse than ​in the original. But that verse was unnecessary and the poem is stronger without it.
“Some time ago a Rhode Island manufacturer printed the poem in a leaflet to hand about. I suppose doing that was a relief to him from the grind of business. I understand that the Theosophists swear by the poem. I hear from it a great deal. People say to me, ‘That poem has been more to me than anything else in my life.’”
The poem as usually quoted, and as Burroughs himself used it as a preface to his book, The Light of Day, has six stanzas, but as originally published in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1863 (Vol. 61, page 201), it had seven, the extra stanza (the sixth in the original version) being as follows:
Yon floweret nodding in the wind Is ready plighted to the bee; And, maiden, why that look unkind? For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee.
A few years ago Joel Benton wrote a warm letter to the New York Times protesting against the dropping of this stanza as an act of vandalism.
“This poem,” he said, “is one of the very few specific poems of the nineteenth century that grasps an idea of supreme importance and ​gives it a supreme setting and expression. It has had, however, one misfortune, that of being ‘improved’ by a meddlesome interference that should be put in the list of legal torts. Some squeamish person has elided the following stanza and set the lyric afloat in a mangled form,” and he quotes the stanza which is given above.
“Why a symbolic reference,” continues Mr. Benton, “to the most enormous element and force in nature should require this self-assumed fissiparous performance would trouble a Philadelphia lawyer to tell. The grannified impulse that does this mean surgery is not uncommon, and even Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’ has been subjected to it. The verse omitted from that by false prudery is the following, if I may quote again from memory:
“‘Oh, stay,’ the maiden said, ‘and rest Thy weary head upon this breast!’ A tear stood in his bright blue eye, But still he answered, with a sigh, ‘Excelsior!’”
All of which gives rather the impression of fighting windmills. The stanza from “Excelsior” has never been omitted from any version of the poem which has come under the observation of the present scribe, who can detect nothing in it to offend the most prudish. Who ​dropped the sixth stanza from “Waiting” has never been discovered, but it was probably cut out not by a Mr. Bowdler but by some intelligent critic. It is far more reasonable to suppose that it was dropped, not because of any squeamishness, but because, as any one can see, it is distinctly inferior to the remainder of the poem. Burroughs was quite right in saying that the poem is stronger without it.
Also, it is entirely contrary to the facts of life, as another correspondent in the Times subsequently pointed out. “Maidens are not in the habit of looking unkindly on the lovers who seek them,” she observes, quite justly, “unless there are good reasons!” Indeed, the complaint of the moralists has always been that maidens, all too often, are far kinder than they should be!
Nowhere in his talks does Burroughs make any reference to the fact that he subsequently wrote a concluding stanza to the poem, which perhaps sums up the philosophy of his later life:
The law of love threads every heart And knits it to its utmost kin, Nor can our lives flow long apart From souls our secret souls would win.
This stanza has fortunately been preserved by Mrs. Alice Cleary Sutcliffe. “Several years ​ago,” she writes, “while spending a never-to-be-forgotten day at Slabsides, the poet inscribed this stanza for one of our party, and explained that he had composed it after his famous poem was committed to print. It adds an important element of psychic force to the fateful prophecy, ‘Mine own shall come to me.’”
So far as known, this stanza has not been preserved elsewhere; but it furnishes an altogether worthy conclusion to the poem and should perhaps be added to it.
Long before his death John Burroughs completely outgrew the iron-bound tenets of the Hardshell Baptists, and this was due, in no small degree, to his constantly growing intimacy with nature, and his observation of her moods.
“I didn’t start in the bird business until the spring of 1863,” he says in one of his talks. “I was twenty-five or twenty-six years old before birds began to interest me.” But from that time on, they interested him more and more—and not birds only, but all the manifestations of the world about him. It was characteristic of him that nothing seemed to him too minute or too commonplace to be unworthy his attention; but this study gave him an ever increasing sense of his own isolation.
As he phrases it, he became more and more ​conscious as he grew older of “the great cosmic chill.” For years he had watched the tremendous processes of nature going on entirely independent of man, often seemingly contemptuous of him; he had come to realize that he was not shut in by any protecting walls, but that he was naked in the universe and that he had to “take his chance and warm himself as best he could.”
He had never had that vivid realization of hell which was part and parcel of his father’s religion, and had never had the slightest belief in the devil. He refused to speculate about the Trinity, which seemed to him just a puzzle which men had set up for their own confusion. Evil, he thought, was merely a phase of good, and seemed evil only because of man’s limited and imperfect understanding.
“I have never accepted the creed of any church,” he adds. “I have given my heart to Nature instead of to God, but that has never cast a shadow over my mind or conscience. I believe God is Nature. I also believe that there is some sort of omnipotent intelligence underlying the manifestations of power and the orderliness that we see in the universe. Personal immortality has never seemed to me probable, though I can’t say that it is impossible. What Nature’s ends are, or God’s ends, I often have but a faint idea. Most of our preachers seem much too sure; but however much I differ with ​them, I think we can agree that it is always fitting to preach the gospel of beauty in the commonplace. Look about your own vicinity and find heaven. The grand and beautiful are there if you have eyes for them.”
And that was the gospel which John Burroughs preached to the very end of his days.