# The Man Who Died Twice (1924)

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Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1925.
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THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
The Man Who Died Twice
By Edwin Arlington Robinson
New York The MacMillan Company 1924 All rights reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Copyright, 1924,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1924.
TO
JAMES EARLE FRASER
AND
LAURA GARDIN FRASER
THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
If I had not walked aimlessly up town That evening, and as aimlessly walked back, My glance had not encountered then, if ever, The caps and bonnets of a singing group That loudly fought for souls, and was at first No more than a familiar spot of sound And color in a long familiar scene; And even at that, if an oblique persuasion Had not withheld me and inveigled me To pause, I should have passed as others did, Never to guess that while I might have touched him, ​Fernando Nash was beating a bass drum And shouting Hallelujah with a fervor At which, as I remember, no man smiled.
Not having seen him for so many years, And seeing him now almost as one not there Save in remembrance or imagination, I made of his identity, once achieved, The ruin of a potential world-shaker— For whom the world, which had for twenty years Concealed him and reduced him, had not shaken. Here were the features, and to some degree The massive aggregate of the whole man, Where former dominance and authority Had now disintegrated, lapsed, and shrunken To an inferior mystery that had yet The presence in defeat. At a first view, ​He looked a penitent Hercules, none too long Out of a hospital. But seeing him nearer, One read where manifest havoc must for years Have been at work. What havoc, and what work, I partly guessed; for I had known before That he had always been, apart from being All else he was, or rather along with it, The marked of devils—who must have patiently And slowly crucified, for subtle sport, This foiled initiate who had seen and felt Meanwhile the living fire that mortal doors For most of us hold hidden. This I believe, Though some, with more serenity than assurance, May smile at my belief and wish me well.
Puzzled, I waited for a word with him; And that was how I came to know all this ​That I should not have known, so he averred, But for a memory that survived in him That I had never yelped at him with others, Who feared him, and was not among the biters, Who, in the years when he was dangerous Had snapped at him until he disappeared Into the refuge of remoter streets And partly was forgiven. I was grateful— Assuring him, as adroitly as I might, That had he written me down among the biters, I should have mourned his error. “Let them go; They were so near forgotten,” he said once, Up there in his gaunt hall-room not long after, “That memory now becomes a punishment For nourishing their conceit with my contempt As once I did. What music have they made So different in futility since then ​That one should hear of it? I make a music That you can hear all up and down Broadway. Glory to God! Mine are the drums of life— After those other drums. I had it—once. They knew I had it, and they hated me For knowing just what they had. I had it—once!” At that his eyes glowed and his body shook, And it was time to go. Fernando Nash, I saw, would not be long in going farther. The rough resentful egoist I had known Was now a shell. The giant had been reduced; And the old scorn that once had been his faith Was now a sacrificial desperation.
A year before I found him in the street Pounding a drum and shouting for the lost, ​He had for a long time, from his account, Inhabited the Valley of the Shadow— A region where so many become so few To know, that each man there believes himself In his peculiar darkness more alone Than any other. However that may have been, Fernando Nash’s darkness we may grant Was dark enough and as peculiar, surely, As all those who had bitten him would have had it. I was not one of them, though I fear now That acquiescence was a larger part Than he conceived in me of kindliness; And I should not have thought him outwardly Much given to soliciting, in those days, Attention any softer than respect— Which was not always, or by those who feared him, ​Conferred without a sure and small alloy Of hate, that made the giver and gift alike A negligible mildew to Fernando, In whose equipment of infirmities A place that might have held a little envy Was overfilled with scorn. Out of his realm, And only with a tinkler’s apprehension Of what those unproved opuses of his Were like to do when they began to sing, There was no reason in eternity For me to be distressed at his assurance That they were all immortal. Who was I, A hewer of wood, to say that they were not, Or to be disaffected if they should be? Today I cannot tell you what was in them, Nor shall tomorrow know; for they are now, As ashes, mute as ashes. Whether he found ​Their early glory to be going out, Or whether in one last fury against fate He made an end of them, as afterwards He would have made an end of other relics, I do not know. The most he ever told me Later about them was that they were dead. And how they died, and how much better it was For them to be where dead things ought to be— Adding at once, that I be not mistaken, That he had known himself to be no liar The while he praised them. It was not for them That he fed scorn to envy in those days, Nor out of them so much as out of him That envy grew. “They knew I had it—once,” He said; and with a scowl said it again, Like a child trying twice the bitter taste Of an unpalatable panacea: ​“They knew I had it—once! Do you remember What an upstanding Ajax I was then? And what an eye I had? I scorched ’em with it. I scared ’em; and they knew I was a giant. I knew it, also; and if I had known One other thing, I should have gone down then Upon my knees for strength—I who believed Myself to be secure. They knew a little, But they knew nothing of what I know now. A year before you found what’s left of me, That evening in the street, I should have said My way was blank and ruinous to the end, But there was more to be, Glory to God! There was to be a more revealing end Than that—an end that once had been for me The bitterest end of all—and is not so. For in the music I have heard since then ​There are the drums of life. Glory to God! I had it—once.”
So much of him was gone, That I would hear no more. All the way home, The restive exultation in his eyes And in his bearing, altered and subdued, Was like that of a dead friend out of hell, Humbled, and hardly more than half assured Of even his respite. There may have been a giant, If he must have it so, but where was now The man whom I remembered and was once Fernando Nash? So much of him was gone, That I should never learn, from what remained, The story of the rest—or so I thought, All the way home. But there was more concealed ​Within the shell of him than I supposed— More than I know today; though many a time Thereafter I went back to him again, Till I had heard enough to make me doubt The use of doubting, for he had it—once. I had known that, and then for years had lost him— For all those years while he had crushed unripe The grapes of heaven to make a wilder wine Than earth gives even to giants who are to live And still be giants. It may be well for men That only few shall have the grapes of heaven To crush. The grapes of heaven are golden grapes, And golden dregs are the worst dregs of all— Or so Fernando surely would have said A year before.
​A year before I found him, Pounding a drum and shouting to the street, Fernando Nash heard clocks across the town One midnight, and was forty-five years old; And he was too far sundered from his faith And his ambition, buried somewhere together Behind him, to go stumbling back for them, Only to find a shadowy grave that held So little and so much. The barren room— The same in which I sought him a year later— Was not much larger than the iron bed On which he sat; and all there was of music About the place was in a dusty box Of orchestrations for the janitor, And in the competent plain face of Bach, Calm in achievement, looking down at him Like an incurious Titan at a worm, ​That once in adolescent insolence Would have believed himself another Titan. Fernando sat with his large heavy face Held forward in his hands and cursed his works Till malediction was a weariness, And all his makeshift insolence a lie That only cravens who had trained themselves To fight and had not fought were silly enough To fancy for the truth. No insolence That he remembered would have been sufficient Without additions and foreseen betrayals To make of him this penitential emblem Of that which he was not. When he had called Himself a worm, another worm turned at once Within his heart and bit him; and just then The candid face of one that heretofore Had been for him as near to the divine ​As any might be, and through all had remained so, Became as if alive there on the wall, Transfigured into living recognition, Wherein there was much wonder and some pity, And more regret. The Titan, it would seem, For the first time, and ruinously too late, And only for a moment interested, Saw what had happened and could do no more, Having seen, than to recede ineffably Aloft into the distance and the dark, Until he was as high as a large star That shines on death and life and death in life Indifferently. Fernando Nash at length Arose, leaving his bed for his one chair; And under the sick gleam of one gas-flame, That had for years to shadowy lodgers given More noise than light, he sat before a glass ​That was more like a round malevolent eye Filmed with too many derelict reflections, Appraising there a bleared and heavy face Where sodden evil should have been a stranger.
“What are you doing here? And who are you?” He mumbled, with cloudy consciousness Of having felt a ghostly blow in the face From an unseemly mirrored visitor That he had not invited. “And how long Have you been on your way, do you suppose, To come to this? If I remember you As first you were anointed and ordained, There was a daemon in you, not a devil, Who told you then that when you heard those drums Of death, it would be death to follow them. ​You were to trust your daemon and to wait, And wait, and still to wait. You had it—once. You had it then—though you had not yet heard it, Coming as it would have to come some time, Blown down by choral horns out of a star To quench those drums of death with singing fire Unfelt by man before. You knew it then. You felt it singing down out of the sky When you were only a small boy at school; And you knew then that it was all for you, For you and for the world, that it was coming. Where is it now? It may be coming yet, For someone else, but you do not know that; And that was not what you were meant to know. O, you poor toad, why could you not have waited? Why did you have to kill yourself like this? Why did you let the devil’s retinue ​That was to be a part be everything, And so drive out your daemon till your star Should sing unheard for you whose ears were left Only for drums and songs of your destroyers? And now even they are gone—all but the drums. You knew that if you waited, they, not you, Should cease—that they should all be hushed at last In that great golden choral fire of sound. ‘Symphony Number Three. Fernando Nash.’ Five little words, like that, if you had waited, Would be enough tonight, you flabby scallion, To put you on the small roll of the mighty. As for the other two, they’re in a box Under the bed; and they will soon be nowhere. You do not have to mourn now over them, For they were only ladders carrying you ​Up to the half-way place from which you fell, And should have fallen, since you were going to fall, A little faster, and so broken at once Your neck. Why could you not have fallen faster And saved yourself all this? If you had given The devil a sign to play those drums of death Longer and louder at about that time, You might be now a carrion more at ease Than you are like to be till you make haste. What wine in God’s name, are you waiting for? And where’s the use? And while I’m asking that; Where was the use of all your prentice-years Wherein you toiled, while others only tinkled, Till you were master of a new machine That only your invention could have built Or driven? You built it and you let it rust. ​A fog of doubt that a small constant fire Would have defeated had invisibly And imperceptibly crept into it, And made the miracle in it that was yours A nameless toy for the first imbecile To flout who found it—wherefore he’ll not find it. Presently Number One and Number Two Will be beyond all finding. Number Three Will not be farther from his eyes tomorrow; And they’ll all be as safe together then As we should be if we had not been born. The circle fills itself; and there you are Inside it, where you can’t crawl out of it. It holds you like a rat in a round well, Where he has only time and room to swim In a ring until he disappears and drowns, If it be true that rats abandon ships ​That sail away to sink, praise be to rats! If you were one, you'd never find another For shipmate. He would know you for a fool, And therefore dangerous. You're not even a rat; For a good rat will wait for what is coming, Whether it comes or not. You could not wait, Knowing that it must come. You had it—once. You had enough of it to make you know, And were among the sceptred of the few In having it. But where’s your sceptre now? You threw it away; and then went wallowing After that other music, and those drums— Assured by more than man’s authority That all you had not then was only waiting To make of that which once was you a torch Of sound and fire that was to flood the world With wonder, and overwhelm those drums of death ​To a last silence that should have no death. That would have been somewhat the way of it, You somewhat less than eminent dead fish, If you had waited and had been content To let those devils and those devil-women Beat as they would your drums and dance and sing And be invisible. You had followed them, And seen and heard enough of them, God knows, Already. Your daemon had a lenience then, And you had not the protest of a soul Between you and your right to stay alive; All which was as it was. But it was so No longer when you knew it was not so, And that one day a bush might bloom with fire At any trivial hour of inattention, Whereafter your employment would have been ​A toil of joy for immortality. Your drums of death, from which it all began, Would then have been illusions most enduring When most entirely and divinely dead; And you, Fernando Nash, would now have been— But who’s alive to know that you’re alive To care? Look at that burned out face of yours, You bloated greasy cinder, and say who. Say who’s to care, and then say, if you will, Why anyone in a world where there’s a cockroach, Should care for you. You insufficient phoenix That has to bake at last in his own ashes— You kicked out, half-hatched bird of paradise That had to die before you broke your shell,— Who cares what you would be if you had flown? A bird that men are never to see flying, Or to hear singing, will not hold them long ​Away from less ethereal captivations; Just as a fabulous and almighty fish That never swam to sight will hardly be For long the unsighted end of their pursuit. Why do you make then such a large ado Over such undefended evidence? You fat and unsubstantial jelly-fish, That even your native ocean has disowned And thrown ashore, why should men ask or care What else you would have been if you had waited? You crapulous and overgrown sick lump Of failure and premeditated ruin, What do you think you are—one of God’s jokes? You slunk away from him, still adequate For his immortal service, and you failed him; And you knew all the while what you were doing. ​You damned yourself while you were still alive. You bulk of nothing, what do you say to that? You paramount whale of lust and drunkenness, You thing that was, what do you say to that?”
No man so near to glory as he was once Was ever, I fancied, quite so inglorious As in his penance—which is here somewhat Softened in deference to necessity— Fernando Nash revealed himself to me In passionate reminiscence a year later. Occasional strokes, at least, among the many That I had counted must have registered Luxurious and unmerited flagellation, Wherein abasement was akin to pride, If not a part of it. No man so mired As he was in his narrative, I told him, ​Could have such choral gold poured down from heaven When he was young. But there he shook his head In hopeless pity—not for the doomed, I saw, But rather for the sanguine ordinary That sees no devil and so controls itself, Having nothing in especial to control.
“Hewers of wood,” I said, “and drawers of water Will always in their innocence be insisting That your enamel of unrighteousness Is too thick to be real.” In his changed eyes, Where the old fire was gone, there was almost The coming of a smile: “How do you know?” He answered, asking. “What have you done to know? ​Where have you been that you should think you know? Do you remember when I told you once That every sleeve of genius hides a knife That will, if necessary, carve a way Through snakes and oxen? Most that I said then Has gone with all the rest, but I keep this As a memorial of my retribution. I wonder if a notion has yet seized you To bury the keenest sword you ever saw For twenty years in mud, and then go back To find what may be left of it. If not, You need not. Save your curiosity Two decades of unprofitable conjecture, And look at me. Look at Fernando Nash,— The heir-apparent of a throne that’s ashes, ​The king who lost his crown before he had it, And saw it melt in hell.”
When he had ceased I could almost have heard those drums of death Pounding him on to a defeated grave, Which, had I not by chance encountered him Beating another drum for the Lord’s glory There in the street, would have been no man's grave, Like that of one before him who still wears The crown he could not lose. I thought of him, Whose tomb was an obscure and stormy legend, Sure of how little he had cared for that— And how much less would this man here have cared Whether he found a nameless grave, or no grave, So long as he had left himself alive ​Behind him in a world that would have loved him Only the more for being out of it. That long orchestral onslaught of redemption Would have exonerated flesh and folly And been his everlasting epitaph— Which time would then have read as variously As men are various in their ways and means Of reading. That would have cancelled everything, And all his earthly debts—or left him willing To pay them peradventure as they might Or must be paid. But they had run too long. His birthright, signed away in fettered sloth To the most ingenious and insatiable Of usurers, had all vanished; and the more He might have been a king, the more their greed Would mock him and his tatters, and abase him; ​And his vituperative temporizing Over a eh in rags would mend no holes. “But there’s a crown that even the lowliest May learn to wear,” he said. “Glory to God!” And his eyes glittered with an icy joy That made me hope that he was wearing it. “Of course we can’t forget,” he said in answer To doubt that in my silence may have spoken; “Yet there is much that we may leave behind, And there is always more if we go on.”
In marking after that the accuracy Of his minute recount, I found it hard Not to believe that he remembered all— Save that which of itself was everything, Or once had been so. There before the mirror, That bitter midnight when he heard the clocks, ​There was not much forgetting; and since then Only one year was gone. Before that glass He must have sat for more than a long hour, Hurling the worst of his vocabulary At his offending image. “Now you have learned A part of what you are,” he told his face, “And you may say whatever occurs to you As an addendum. You deficient swine, Where do you see the best way out of it? You are not crazy enough to cut your throat; You are not solid enough to shoot yourself. There’s always water, but you don’t like that; And you're not sure enough of what might happen If you should inadvertently have swallowed A few small pills. But there’s another way— A longer and a more monotonous one, Yet one that has no slight ascendency ​Over the rest; for if you starve to death, Maybe the God you've so industriously Offended in most ways accessible Will tell you something; and if you live again You may attain to fewer discrepancies In less within you that you may destroy. That’s a good way for you to meet your doubt, And show at the same time a reverence That’s in you somewhere still.” And I believe, Though he may well then have believed in nothing More real than a defective destiny, That it was in him somewhere, as he said. There was a fervor in his exceration That was not only drama; though I question Whether I should have found him and his drum That evening a year after, in the street, If he had not gone farther, while he starved, ​Into the valley—which had for twenty years Already beguiled and held him. What had been Without this uncompanioned expiation, I do not know, and I might never have known. The shape of one more foiled obscurity Might some time as a cadaver have ensured A massive and unusual exhibition Of God’s too fallible image—and no more. Though some had wondered idly, and they might, Why the defeated features of a giant Should have been moulded so imperiously To be the mask of frailty in oblivion, None would have rated such a scrapped utensil As more than common, or uncommon, waste; None would have guessed what violent fire had once, In such a cracked abandoned crucible, ​Fused with inseparable obscure alloy Celestial metal, which would else have been The fabric of a seething instrument That might have overflowed with other fire Brought falling from ethereal distances.
It might, I say, cleaving inveterately To my conviction that in this man’s going More went than when in Venice went the last Authentic wizard, who in his house of sound Hears not the siege of Time. Failing a way To prove that one obscure evangelist, Beating a drum and shouting for the Lord, Not only might have been (to fill again That weary sieve with wine) but was in fact A giant among fewer than half your fingers Of Jubel’s clan,—and surely having given ​Credulity, dismayed imaginably In retrospect, extenuating warrant To hang itself conveniently at leisure,— Only Fernando Nash’s narrative Will now avail me for the confirmation Of more, I fear, than the confirmable— As he would have foretold. Reverting quaintly And incompatibly with his arrogance To the weak stings of his inferiors, And even while dying, he smiled. “Poor souls,” he said, “That are born damned, although they may be feared May be forgiven, though hated, and then hanged; Whereas my early colleagues, had they known How soon and surely I was to damn myself, Not only would have ceased their fearing me, ​But would have loved me—seeing that I was doomed. That midnight—when I cursed myself so long— Roundly and rightly, be it well understood— There came a few revealing memories That set me then to wondering just what soft And anaesthetic language of affection They would have brought for me if they had known How far I was from all that formerly Had for so long offended and oppressed them. Poor children!—and they might all have been happy If in the place of misapplied creation A more discriminate wisdom had supplied Discrimination—and some humility Before God’s few that are in spite of us ​Surviving, somehow.” And all this to me Was not quite so irrelevant as to others It may at first appear; for the same thought Pursued me always in those other days When I had harmonized ingeniously Some brief and unoffending cerebration Which, had it been one, would have been a song. To some persuasion sharper than advice I must have yielded slowly and at last Let fall my lyre into the fearsome well Of truth, hearing no protest from below; Thereby surviving bitterness to indite This tale of one who foundered in a slough More fearsome, and lost there a mightier lyre.
He was not humble, this Fernando Nash; Yet while he may have ministered on occasion ​To a discreet humility in others, I doubt if in the scorn he flung to us, Mostly in silence, his preoccupation Saw crumbs of any nurture less assuaging Than wholesome and unfrosted honesty; Albeit his arrogance may have merited The few vindictive nippings that amazed As much as they annoyed, and would have seemed Allegiance, had their negligible venom Been isolated from another virus, Which later was to be a leprosy Of self-contempt attending revelation.
When he had heard the last stroke of those clocks, And called himself again the last hard name That his abundant lexicon released, He tore those two initial symphonies ​Into as many pieces of oblivion As he had reasons, or believed he had, After those empty years, for their extinction. “They were so ‘temerarious’ and ‘exotic’ When they were written twenty years ago, He said, “that all who saw them laughed at them— Not seeing with me that they would be today About as temerarious and exotic As Handel’s hat. They were good harbingers, But were they living they would not be mine; They were not what it was that I was doing The while I did them. Many, if they were theirs, Would eat their ears for joy, but they‘re not theirs, Or mine. Glory to God, they’re nowhere now. They were not mine; they were not yet the vintage; ​Though I should have enjoyed, when I was young, The taste of them. But they were not the wine To fill my cup, and now it doesn’t matter.”
There was for some time an obscurity For me in such a reasoning, but I learned, And I have striven loyally to believe That he did well—sure that he did not well In going down those dark stairs again that night For the beginning of a last debauch That was to be a prelude, as he put it, Wincing in reminiscence, for a fugue Of ravening miseries and recriminations Assembling in remorseful exposition That was to be remorseless and infernal Before they were devouring one another In a malicious fantasy more infernal, ​And richer in dissonance and involution Than all his dreams together had heretofore Aspired or dared to be. When halfway down The second of those four forbidding stairways, He heard those drums again, and on his face He felt with more resentment than alarm A touch of warning, like a chilly wind Within a tomb. “You are too late,” he said, Holding his heavy jaws harder together; “And you have come too many times before.” Then he went grimly down and out of doors, And was alone there in a lonely street That led where soon he might not be so lonely, Or so severe in his particulars.
After three weeks that would have relegated A village blacksmith or a stevedore ​Of mortal average to a colder sleep Than has a waking, he awoke one day Late in the afternoon, miraculously In bed again and wondering, as before, How this time he had got there. Looking up, He met the face of Bach upon the wall, Who bowed at him, gravely but not unkindly; And he, not yet alive to what was coming, And not to be defective in attention To a great master, bowed acknowledgment; Whereat the salutations were repeated, And there was a preparatory silence, Heavy with strangeness and expectancy, Which would have been a monitory dread— But for the master’s nod of satisfaction And interest in the coming through a keyhole Of a slow rat, equipped with evening dress, ​Gold eye-glasses, and a conductor’s wand, Soon followed by a brisk and long procession Of other rats, till more than seventy of them, All dressed in black and white, and each of them Accoutred with his chosen instrument, Were ranged in order on the footworn carpet That lay between Fernando and the door. Having no chairs, they stood erect and ready, And having made obeisance to the master Upon the wall, who signified his pleasure, And likewise to the man upon the bed, They played with unforeseen solemnity The first chords of the first rat symphony That human ears had heard. Baffled and scared, Fernando looked at Bach, who nodded slowly, And, as he fancied, somewhat ominously; And still the music sounded, weird but firm, ​And the more fearful as it forged along To a dark and surging climax, which at length Broke horribly into coarse and unclean laughter That rose above a groaning of the damned; And through it all there were those drums of death, Which always had been haunting him from childhood. Without a formal ending, or any sign That there was ever to be an end, the rats Danced madly to the long cacophony They made, and they made faces at Fernando The while they danced—till one of them, the leader, Bowed mockingly, and vanished through the keyhole, As he had come; and after him went others, ​Each with a leering courtesy as he went, Till more than seventy of them disappeared, Leaving their auditor lying there alone In a cold sweat, while his impassive master Frowned, shook his head, and was again a picture.
Fernando Nash, deploring afterwards This innovation of orchestral rats As a most arbitrary intermezzo Between the sordid prelude that was over And the infernal fugue that was to come, Smiled wearily, and shrugged his heavy shoulders, Like one who would be glad to say no more, Yet must relate the rest to somebody Before he died. Somebody might believe him; And it was I, who had not bitten him (Achilles’ heel was never to be cured), ​Who might, if anyone might, believe him now, And say to others that he was not mad Through that incessant week of lonely torture Which no food would have eased, and through the days That followed while he starved indomitably, With a cold hope that his long-punished heart, Would after time be still. Day after day, And endless night following endless night, There were those miseries and recriminations Devouring one another but never dead, Until one afternoon he lay remembering The day when those unusual visitors Had made a more unusual music for him, And having made it mocked him and departed. Again he looked up at the face of Bach, Considering wearily, with a bleak regret ​How far those features in their dusty frame Were now from seeing that there was in this world So frail a relic as Fernando Nash, And how much farther still they were from caring, With more than common care, could they have seen him. Could they have seen him they would not have known What fires had burned in that cadaverous ruin Below them, or what hopes, or what remorse, Or what regret. For a long time he lay Aware of action hardly in a finger, But with a coming wonder of surprise For a new clearness which had late begun To pierce forbidden chambers long obscured Within him, and abandoned, being so dark And empty that he would not enter them— ​Fearful of what was not there to be found Should he go there to see. They might be dark, But folly that made them so had kept them so, Like an indulgent slayer who binds a wound That he has washed wtih a lethargic poison, And waits at ease with his malignity For stagnant fury to accumulate A mortal sloth within—and in so far As that was in a manner merciful, Though now it seemed there was to be an end Of even that mercy. After a grateful darkness, There was to be the pain of seeing too clearly More than a man so willing to see nothing Should have to see.
Still motionless, he lay there Laboring to persuade a lying hope ​That this new clarity was the light that comes Before the night comes, and would not last long— Yet knowing that it was not. Like shining grain, Long fouled and hidden by chaff and years of dust In a dark place, and after many seasons Winnowed and cleaned, with sunlight falling on it, His wits were clear again. He had no power To use them, and at first repudiated The faintest wakening flicker of any wish For use of any such power. But a short fight Found his whole fragile armor of negation So tattered that it fell away from him Like time-worn kingly rags of self-delusion At the rough touch of the inevitable— Till he confessed a rueful willingness To reason that with time and care this power ​Would come, and coming might be used. He smiled And closed his eyes, finding an awkward humor In such an unforeseen enfranchisement From such a long and thwarting servitude. A calm that all his life had been a stranger To the confusions that were born with him Composed and overpowered him as he felt, Enveloping and persuading body and brain Together, a cool relief as if warm wings Were in the air above him. So there he lay, Without a motion or a wish to move, And with a sense of having only to rise And give his hands to life. A grateful shame For all his insults to the Holy Ghost That were forgiven was like an anodyne Laid on a-buried wound somewhere within him, ​Deeper than surgeons go; and a vast joy, Which broke and swept and covered him like a sea Of innocence, leaving him eager as a child That has outlived experience and remembers Only the golden moment as it flows, Told him in silence that was more than speech That after passion, arrogance and ambition, Doubt, fear, defeat, sorrow and desperation, He had wrought out of martyrdom the peace That passeth understanding. Still he lay there Smiling to think how soon those burrowing teeth Which he had felt within him for so long Would cease their famished gnawing at his heart, Which after all the many prolonged assaults It had survived was toiling loyally, With only an uncertain fire to drive it; ​And still he would not move. There would be time For all things in their order. He was hungry— Hungry beyond a longer forced endurance, But in this new unwillingness not to live, No longer forced, there was a gratefulness Of infinite freedom and humility, After a bondage of indignant years And evil sloth; and there was in this calm, Which had unlooked for been so long in coming, A balanced wealth of debts and benefits Vaster than all ambition or achievement. Hereafter it would be enough to serve, And let the chosen shine.
So there he lay, Luxuriating vaguely on the moment ​When he should rise and with a blessed effort Go down those shadowy stairs again for food; And if in his prevision of that moment He had not lain so long awaiting it, Those drums of death might opportunely then Have stayed an hour the sound of their approach, Throbbing as always, and intolerably, Through stifling clouds of sound that hid, like flames, Tumultuous and elusive melodies, Now for so long imprisoned as no longer To be released. Hearing them first, and faintly, For once and for once only without flinching, He smiled and sighed. Let others, if they must, Hear them and follow them. He was at peace With them for the first time in recollection, And. willingly for the future would remain so. ​At last alive, it was enough to serve, And so to be content where God should call him; But there must be no haste. His fires were low, And too much fuel might yet extinguish them. At first he must be frugal with his coals, If only for the peril of too much comfort Given at once, and without more atonement. So arrogant in his new humility Was he becoming, and so chary was he Of exultation, that to break his fast With no excess of zeal he planned a fare That would have saddened Simeon on his pillar; And he might soon have been in search of it, Had not another silence, like a blow That somehow stunned him to clairvoyant awe, Held him as if mysterious hands had bound him ​With cords he could not see. Now he could hear Those drums again, and they were coming nearer, Still muffled within the same unyielding cloud Of sound and fire, which had somewhere within it A singing flame that he might not for long Endure, should such a mocking hour as this Be the one hour of all when after years Of smouldering it should leap at him and scorch him. He felt his fingers clutching hungrily At nothing, as the fingers of one drowning Would clutch at seaweed floating where he sank; And he could feel the pounding of those drums Like iron upon the fibre of his brain. His feeble heart was leaping, and a cold Invisible hand was heavy on his throat— As if in mercy, if it need be so, ​To strangle him there before he knew too soon What he must know too late.
Now it was fear, Not peace, that falling on him like a wave, Covered and overwhelmed him; it was fear, Not peace, that made him cold and left him trembling After the cold had passed. The coming drums Were like the vanguard of a Juggernaut Approaching slowly through a rolling cloud Of fiery sound that was anon to burst And inundate him with an ecstacy Of mad regret before those golden wheels Behind should crush him. He could only wait, Therefore, and in his helplessness be seared With his own lightning. When the music leapt ​Out of that fiery cloud and blinded him, There would be recognition for a moment, And then release. So his prophetic fancy, Smiting him with deceit, foresaw the blow, Not seeing what other shafts of doom and mercy There are from which an injured God may choose The one or many that in his exigence His leisure may affect. Seldom it is The mightier moments of necessity That we can see are coming come to us As we have seen them. Better or worse for us, Anticipation waits upon surprise; And though Fernando Nash in his exhaustion Prayed now for that cold hand upon his throat To close and have it over, no cold hand Was there to close. Now there was nothing for him ​But to lie still and hear those coming drums, Muffled as always in a smoky cloud Of burning sound that in a moment more Would burst above him into flaming rain That once he would have welcomed on his knees, Unspeakably; and so he might have done Could he have waited with his inner doors Unbarred to the celestial messengers Who may have come and gone a score of times, Only to find again, and still again, That he was absent on another journey Into the dismal valley of the shadow That was to be his home. But that was over. They had not found him then. He had not waited. Failing a willingness to be assured That in so doing he would have left by now ​The worst of a light burden far behind him And found the rest to be Olympian gold, He had impawned it all for mouldy pottage.
Telling me that, he sighed and shut his teeth, And with a mortal smile shook his large head At me before he went back to those drums. They were not going a sound, as it appeared, Their long approach for ever, but were soon To cease, and only intermittently Be heard again till choral gold came down Out of a star to quench and vanquish them With molten glory. Trembling there alone, He knew that there would now be falling on him The flaming rain he feared, or the one shaft Of singing fire that he no longer feared— At which that hand might close upon his throat ​Till in oblivion there might then be peace; And so at first there was—if there be peace In the complete oblivion of achievement.
Instead of bursting as he prayed it might, And ending him with one destroying blast Of unendurable fulfilment, slowly And imperceptibly that cloud of sound Became a singing mist, which, having melted, Revealed a fire that he had always felt, But never known before. No lightning shaft Of blinding and immediate dissolution Was yet impending: there was only joy, And a vast wonder that all this had been So near him for so long. Smiling and still, He listened gratefully. It had come at last; And those far sent celestial messengers ​That he had for so long a time denied Had found him now. He had offended them, He had insulted and forsaken them, And he was not forsaken. They had come, And in their coming had remembered only That they were messengers, who like himself Had now no choice; and they were telling him this In the last language of mortality, Which has no native barrier but the grave. Now it was theirs to sing and his to wear The glory, although there was a partnership Somewhere that a surviving grace in him Remembered; for though the star from which they came Shone far within the dark infinity That was himself, he had not made it shine— ​Albeit he may have wrought more notably Than might another for its extinguishment.
But there was time for not much more of that Than a bewildered smile of acquiescence. The quivering miracle of architecture That was uprising lightly out of chaos, And out of all the silence under time, Was a gay temple where the Queen of Life And her most loyal minions were protracting Melodious and incessant festival To the least lenient of divinities. Joy, like an infinite wine, was everywhere, Until it proved itself at last a languor, Now less engrossed with festive pageantry Than with an earth-born sensuous well-being Which in the festive pageant was divine. ​Of all the many of those who danced and sang And celebrated, there was none to note A silent entrance of the most abhorred And oldest of all uninvited strangers— A lean and slinking mute with a bassoon, Who seized attention when a languid hush Betrayed a perilous rift of weariness Where pleasure was not joy, and blew a tune Of hollow triumph on a chilly reed From which all shrank. The tumult after that Was an unprized expenditure of beauty Awaiting doom. It was awaiting also The faint approach of slow, infernal drums That were not long in coming, bringing with them A singing horde of demons, men and women, Who filled the temple with offensive yells And sang to flight the frightened worshippers. ​Fearing to think, he lay as one secure So long as he lay motionless. If he moved It might be only to plunge down again Into a more chaotic incoherence And a more futile darkness than before. There was no need of moving, and no need Of asking; for he knew, as he had known For years, unheard, that passionate regret And searching lamentation of the banished, Who in abandoned exile saw below them The desecrated lights of a domain Where they should walk no more. Inaudible At first, he knew it only as a presence Intangible, but he knew that it was there; And as it went up slowly to the stars Carrying all the sorrow of man with it, He trembled that he should so long have been ​So near to seizing immortality. Well, here it was. And while he might have died If it had ceased, he would have been as one Who cared no more, having had everything, Where there was no more caring. But he knew That he was not yet dead, and that the rest Would soon be coming. When the voices fell, He knew that through them he should hear those drums Again, but he was not afraid of them. They were his drums, and the far sound of riot Below there in the gloom was also his. It was all his to give. “Poor fool,” he thought; “Praise God you are a fool, and call it yours.” And he lay tranquil through another silence.
Though he condemned the specious tyranny ​Of illustrations and explicit schemes, He kept in his creative charnel house More pictures hidden of the dead and dying Than men should see; and there were these among them, Which he submitted once, reluctantly, As to a loyal friend who would forgive them, And then forget. Yet I remember now That in the place of languid folly flown To mourn apart, bereft of its illusions, The desolation of its realities, There woke amid the splendors that were lost A frantic bacchanale of those usurpers, Who in affronting life with evil rites Of death, knew not themselves to be the dead— In false authority mistaking riot And scorn for power, and hell for paradise. ​Intoxicated by their swift invasion Whereafter conquest was an easy trifle, And hating the magnificence they cursed, Seeing not the beauty or the use of it, They soiled with earthy feet the shining floor Flinging the dregs of their debaucheries From crystal cups against the gleaming walls Of Life’s immortal house. Too ignorant Of where they were to be afraid to know, They shrieked and sang in shrill delirium With vicious ecstasy for louder drums— Till, crowning insolence with infamy, They must have wearied God—who, pitying them, Smote with avenging trumpets into silence All but those drums of death, which, played by Death Himself, were beating sullenly alone. ​They ceased, and after stillness in which time And space, together perishing, were no more To him than indecisions that were gone, Far off there was a murmur and a sinning Of liberation, and a marching hymn Sang of a host returning. All the banished Who had been driven from the house of life To wander in the valley of the shadow Were sounding as they came in chastened order The praise of their deliverance and return. A singing voice that gathered and ascended Filled the vast dome above them till it glowed With singing light that seemed at first eternal, But was at first not so. There were those drums Again, to frustrate with a last intrusion The purifying and supreme festival Of life that had returned and in its house ​Was daring to be free. But freedom wavered Out of the voices that were praising it; And while it wavered, the lean hand of Death Beat with a desperate malevolence, More sinister in its evil emptiness Than when that carnal chorus of the dead, With corybantic and infatuate glee Had howled it out of hearing—till once more There were those golden trumpets, and at last There was that choral golden overflow Of sound and fire, which he had always heard— And had not heard before. Now it had come, And had not gone. Nothing had gone that came. All he had known and had not waited for Was his; and having it, he could not wait now. With blinding tears of praise and of exhaustion Pouring out of his eyes and over his cheeks, ​He groped and tottered into the dark hall, Crying aloud for God, or man, or devil, For paper—not for food. It may have been The devil who heard him first and made of him, For sport, the large and sprawling obstacle They found there at the bottom of the stairs.
A fortnight after that, Fernando Nash Lay contemplating with a special envy A screen between him and another bed That would anon be vacant. For some time, So he had learned, the probabilities Had seen for him a similar departure, But seeing indifferently at the last hour That some residual and peculiar service Awaited the survival of as much As was remaining of him to survive, ​Had left him and abandoned him again To life. The fire of personality, Still glowing within him, drew mysteriously From those assisting at his resurrection A friendly patience, and a sort of wonder That wore a laughing kindness. With a lesion Like his there would be no more golden fire Brought vainly by perennial messengers For one that would no longer recognize them, Or know that they had come. There were somewhere Disfigured outlines of a glory spoiled That hovered unrevealed and unremembered, But they were like to those of blinding jewels Wrought beyond earth to value beyond earth, To be defaced and hammered valueless By a sick idiot, and insanely sunk ​In darker water than where ships go down Hull-crushed at midnight. When he told me that, He may have had a vision of himself In his last, starless plunge. “Make a swift end Of what I leave behind,” he said to me. “Burn me to ashes; and when that is done, Take me somewhere to sea and let me sink, And fear not for my soul. I have found that, Though I have lost all else. All but those drums; And they are but the last hope of the devil. Mine are the drums of life—and they are mine. You may not like them. All I ask of you Is to believe me when I say to you That what I had, I had. It was no dream That followed me so long, and found me only To make of me a child that should henceforth Go into streets and beat the drums of life. ​I make a joyful noise unto the Lord, But I know it’s a noise, and the Lord knows it— Just as he knows that I have told to you Only the truth, and that I had it—once. Fool as I was and remnant as I am, My prayer will be to you that you forget me, If in your memory there survive a doubt That I was less than you believed I was Till I was chastened. For I swear to you That as I knew the quality, not slight, Of a young harvest that I would not save, I know that in the fields where kings have been Before me there was never found by them A sheaf more golden than the grain I lost When the Lord smote my field that afternoon. I am not telling you this to salve a bruise, For now the bruise is healed. I shall go lame ​Because of it, but the Lord’s ways are strange, And I am not to suffer; and I believe The reason for this is that I have not lied. I have not lied to Him in praising Him, Nor more to you in praising what He gave me And in his wisdom took away again. We cannot measure what the world has lost Until we know the gauge the builders use Who made it. All we know about the world For certain is that it appears to be. And in so far as I am sure of that So am I sure that I was once as much As you believed and others feared I was. I have not drugged a clamoring vanity With lies that for a little while may seem To sweeten truth. There was no need of that; And God knows now that there is less than ever. ​Now I can beat my drum and let those drums Of death pound as they will. Once, for an hour, I lived; and for an hour my cup was full With wine that not a hundred, if a score, Have tasted that are told in history. Having it unconfirmed, I might be mad Today if a wise God had not been kind, And given me zeal to serve Him with a means That you deplore and pardonably distrust. The dower of ignorance is to distrust All that it cannot feel, and to be rich In that which it has not. I can be rich In all that I have had, and richer still In this that I have now. Glory to God! Mine are the drums of life, and though I wait For no more messengers—or for none save one, Who will be coming soon—I had it, once. ​Not more than once or twice, and hardly that, In a same century will another have it, To know what I have lost. You do not know. I’ve made for you only a picture of it, No worse or better than a hundred others Might be of the same thing—all mostly trash. But I have found far more than I have lost And so shall not go mourning. God was good To give my soul to me before I died Entirely, and He was no more than just In taking all the rest away from me. I had it, and I knew it; and I failed Him. I did not wait.”
“You could not wait,” I told him, “Instead of moulding you to suit the rules, They made you mostly out of living brimstone, ​And set you in a somewhat fiery world Not to be burnt.” But there he shook his head And looked at me as he had looked before, Like one who was a little sorry for me. I had made several entrances already With my determinism, and always failed. He would have none of it. He was to blame, And it was only right. that he should lose What he had won too late. “Why pity me?” He asked, strangely, “You see that I’m content. I shall not have to be here very long, And there’s not much that I may do for God Except to praise Him. I shall not annoy you, Or your misguided pity, with my evangel, For you must have yours in another dress. I shall not ask if you believe me wise In this that I am doing. I do not care. ​I'll only ask of you that you believe What I have told you. For I had it—once.”
To each his own credulity, I say, And ask as much. Fernando Nash is dead; And whether his allegiance to the Lord With a bass drum was earnest of thanksgiving, Confusion, penance, or the picturesque, Is not the story. There was in the man, With all his frailties and extravagances, The caste of an inviolable distinction That was to break and vanish only in fire When other fires that had so long consumed him Could find no more to burn; and there was in him A giant’s privacy of lone communion With older giants who had made a music Whereof the world was not impossibly ​Not the last note; and there was in him always, Unqualified by guile and unsubdued By failure and remorse, or by redemption, The grim nostalgic passion of the great For glory all but theirs. And more than these, There was the nameless and authentic seal Of power and of ordained accomplishment— Which may not be infallibly forthcoming, Yet in this instance came. So I believe, And shall, till admonition more disastrous Than any that has yet imperilled it Invalidates conviction. Though at first, And many a time thereafter, my persuasion May well have paused and halted, I believe Today that all he told me for the truth Was true—as I believed him long ago To be the giant of his acknowledgment. ​Crippled or cursed or crucified, the giant Was always there, and always will be there. For reasons less concealed and more sufficient Than words will ever make them, I believe him Today as I believed him while he died, And while I sank his ashes in the sea.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1935, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 88 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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