TARCON DOND

THOUGH STONE BE BROKEN

The earth's black rim above the sunset swings
Diminishing the light.

In every shadow stealthy deepenings
Forerun the night.

Massive glooms of the silent, lefty larches
Darken a pool below:

Trailing tender glooms through solemn arches
Fireflies go.

Mystically the polished waters glimmer
With slow soft fire of the flies:

Reflected so, the living love-lamps shimmer
Like lights in eyes.—

Oh lights of eyes I shall not see again—
Gone with the purple years!

Old friends, dear loves of vanished days, in vain
Are this day's tears.

Through them I still can see that mullen stalk's
Corinthian column lift

Ornately from the richly lichened rock's
Root-holding rift;

Still past its pillar's velvet grayness gleam
The lights compassionate,

And still I hear the waters of the stream,
Steady as fate,

Move on continuous as time, a tool
Graving the floor of rock

Whereon I played, a child, above that pool.
A sudden shock

2

Of memory, and all the slow change spread
Through thirty gradual years
Of frost and freshet on that rocky bed
At once appears;

And through the dusk of other days I feel
The falls of childhood stream
Over their vanished ledge of rock unreal--
Gone like a dream.

Gone is the solid stone like thoughts that pass--
As fireflies gleam and go;
Gone like the flowers of spring, the summer's grass,
The winter's snow.

I note the rocky channel backward broken,
The ledge's jagged line,
Reading each inch of it as sign and token
Of days of mine.

Tracing upon that calendar of stone
One man's remembered life--
The joy, shame, sorrow, honor I have known--
The creeds, the strife,

Timing each heart-beat by each sundered shard
Of worn stone fallen here,
My mind traverses mutely yard by yard
Each scripted year.

The graven past, this fluid instant's fall,
The future's mystery,
The whole of it, the feeling of it all,
Comes home to me;

While there above on the yet unorumbled floor
I know the point must lie
Where the receding waterfall shall pour
The day I die.

5

Death does dismay, but even more than this
Heart's hunger lacking food,
Tense melancholy's perilous abyss,
Black solitude;

Immuring barriers, bolted doors held shut,
The hostile world's deep guile,
The stiffened knots of circumstance unout,
Cold chains to file;

Disintegrating grief, life-sapping care,
All things that make us old,
Darkness of faded hope and heart's despair
And love grown cold.

Oh love, dear love remote, to whom I turn
From life's great loneliness,
With all my heavy heart for you I yearn,
And yearning, bless!

You are salvation in the darkness gleaming,
A window in the night,
A sheltered warmness 'mid the wind's wild screaming,
A spear of light!

To night, the rose of dawn; to tempest, calm;
To poverty, rich gold;
To hunger, food; and spring's divinest balm
To winter's cold.

Within your heart I seek the love unknown
In days of girl and boy,
Love lasting longer than the transient stone
The streams destroy.

Love lasting until death—is it a dream—
Is it a dream alone?

Shall no love last here while the unceasing stream
Wears out the stone?

4

We know the future years shall surely show
The wasting of the rock;

Shall rock above and crumbled rock below
Together mock?

Shall anything endure where rock decays
Beneath the raindrop's weight?

Shall Love prevail against the flood of days
Swept on by Fate?

We know not; but we know that only Love
Can keep our hearts alive:

For this--the best that we have knowledge of--
We live and strive.

Love's yearning hope forever to endure
Endures, and yeilts no jet.

Loves fail: the unshaken soul of us makes sure
That Love shall not.

Loves fail: but as we face the corroding powers
That all loves test and try,

My fifth gleams diamond-hard that this of ours
Shall time defy.

Lo, I am yours--by life's profoundest forces
Flooding man's heart and brain,

As waters in the thunder of their courses
Follow the rain.

Love, dearest love, whom bitter barriers keep
In loneliness afar,

Oh bear it till the surging waters sweep
Away the bar.

What bar shall keep love from his own, what force,
What dyke between what shores?

Though stone be broken, down his destined course
The torrent pours.

Davenport, Iowa,

128 W. 6th. Jan. 6th, '11.

My dear Fioke:-

I came near asking you to do what you've
done--some "labor of the file"--or in the case of "Though
Stone Be Broken" should we say "of the chisel"? I wanted
you to suggest words, lines, and stanzas for excision. I
find a pleasure not too (the opposite of sadistic)
in the pain of these delicate choosing--these abandonings of
the thing we like for the thing we like better. I have found
this pleasure wherever I have been able to accept or reject
your suggestions. Only those that leave me on the fence
are painful.

Seriatim:

p.i. "brim". Unable to resist hat-ish, I withdraw the b.

"mystically" A word I have come back to. For me it
taps too definite and permanent a stream of feeling to share
the fate of "grand".

"flies". From the first have shared your objection to
flies without fire. Does this meet your objections to stanza
1119 if so, this letter,

Fireflies go. See 3d page

There in the shadowed water's mystic peace
Their darkened mirror lies
Agleam with moving lights that shine and cease
Like lights in eyes.

"purple". Overworked, it must be admitted. Am doubtful.
The defense of it here rests on the fact that purple is the
color of distance as well as of splendor.

p. 2. "yard by yard". This ought not to look like a make-
rhyme. Of course if it does that condemns it, but it's hard
for me to feel because to begin with I rejected "feet by feet"
and "inch by inch" as either too full of workaday connotations
or as not giving a large enough image of the length of the
channel backward broken. I began with yard by yard and then

get shard. I realize that this is not decisive against your
point.

p. 37. "To night, the rose of dawn;" No inconsiderable improvement. This stanza came near going out for mere intellectuality after the deeper "you are salvation". What saved it was the unawaited welling over of the third line into the fourth. The semiclons bring out better the effect of obstructed movement finally breaking into swift freedom. I amuse myself visualizing them as rocks blocking a brook's flow. XXXVI Would it be an improvement to transpose this stanza and the one preceding?

"Love lasting until death:--" Yes. I didn't like occlusion and dash very well until just now when I saw it typewritten, but even before that saw nothing better.

We know the future years shall surely show
The wasting of the rock:
Shall bestones stone above and broken stone below
Together mock?

Wrote this to see how it locks. On the whole, dislike of
dinning here seems weaker than the Flaubertian dislike of
two different words referring to just the same thing--an un-
escapable confession that one is wrong.

Most of my books being in Buffalo, I am unable to have
the experience of hastening with Shelley to that mood that's
cold beneath the moon. To have suggested a comparison with
his work is gratifying; but what strikes me is the difference
in tempo. Up in my den Fineshriber read "Though Stone Be
Broken", his remarkable voice making it a wonderful Adagio or Largo
This suited the mood of one motionless--watching slight move-
ments and changes of sound and light--weaving these into his
own thoughts--filling all with his own rather sombre emotion.
I could not to lump the poem, Stanzas, of which I have out a
dim recollection, with the rest of Shelley, but everything I
can remember of his has a rapid, light, yet intense movement
like Hungarian music. He loves swiftness, especially the
wind's, here "rapid clouds", and I can't see his imagination
being set moving by a thirty-year change in rock. But this
won't be news to you, nor will it that he deals characteristically
with fire and air, not stone and water.

I'm awfully glad you liked the poem; and wish to thank
you for your interest, your helpful criticism, and the rest of
your good letter.

Yours very sincerely,