# Spring and All/Chapter XIX

CHAPTER XIX
I realize that the chapters are rather quick in their sequence and that nothing much is contained in any one of them but no one should be surprised at this today.
THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM
It is spring. That is to say, it. is approaching THE BEGINNING.
In that huge and microscopic career of time, as it were a wild horse racing in an illimitable pampa under the stars, describing immense and microscopic circles with his hoofs on the solid turf, running without a stop for the millionth part of a second ​ until lie is aged and worn to a heap of skin, bones and ragged hoofs—In that majestic progress of life, that gives the exact impression of Phidias' frizze, the men and beasts of which, though they seem of the rigidity of marble are not so but move, with blinding rapidity, though we do not have the time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years—In that progress of life which seems stillness itself in the mass of its movements—at last SPRING is approaching.
In that colossal surge toward the finite and the capable life has now arrived for the second lime at that exact moment when in the ages past the destruction of the species Homo sapiens occured.
Now at last that process of miraculous verisimilitude, that grate copying which evolution has followed, repeating move for move every move that it made in the past—is approaching the end.
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW.
I
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
​ northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change ​ has come upon then: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
II
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp's horn
petals aslant darkened with mauve
red where in whorls
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats
petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending
above
the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot's rim
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss. ​ A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. There is nothing! Emptiness stares us once more in the face. Whither? To what end?. Each asks the other. Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail? Why are we here? Dora Marsden's philosophic algebra. Everywhere men look into each other's faces and ask the old unanswerable question: Whither? Mow? What? Why?
At any rate, now at last spring is here!
The rock has split, the egg has hatched, the prismatically plumed bird of life has escaped from its cage. It spreads its wings and is perched now on the peak of the huge African mountain Kilimanjaro.
Strange recompense, in the depths of our despair at the unfathomable mist into which all mankind is plunging, a curious force awakens. It is HOPE long asleep, aroused once more. Wilson has taken an army of advisers and sailed for England. The ship has sunk. But the men are all good swimmers. They take the women on their shoulders and buoyed on by the inspiration of the moment they churn the free seas with their sinewey arms, like Ulysses, landing all along the European seaboard.
​ The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of „art", takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass.