John Brown
Though for your sake I would not have you nowSo near to me tonight as now you are,God knows how much a stranger to my heartWas any cold word that I may have written;And you, poor woman that I made my wife,You have had more of loneliness, I fear,Than I—though I have been the most alone,Even when the most attended. So it wasGod set the mark of his inscrutableNecessity on one that was to grope,And serve, and suffer, and withal be gladFor what was his, and is, and is to be,When his old bones, that are a burden now,Are saying what the man who carried themHad not the power to say. Bones in a grave,Cover them as they will with choking earth,May shout the truth to men who put them there,More than all orators. And so, my dear,Since you have cheated wisdom for the sakeOf sorrow, let your sorrow be for you,This last of nights before the last of days,The lying ghost of what there is of meThat is the most alive. There is no deathFor me in what they do. Their death it isThey should heed most when the sun comes againTo make them solemn. There are some I knowWhose eyes will hardly see their occupation,For tears in them—and all for one old man;For some of them will pity this old man,Who took upon himself the work of GodBecause he pitied millions. That will beFor them, I fancy, their compassionateBest way of saying what is best in themTo say; for they can say no more than that,And they can do no more than what the dawnOf one more day shall give them light enoughTo do. But there are many days to be,And there are many men to give their blood,As I gave mine for them. May they come soon!
May they come soon, I say. And when they come,May all that I have said unheard be heard,Proving at last, or maybe not—no matter—What sort of madness was the part of meThat made me strike, whether I found the markOr missed it. Meanwhile, I’ve a strange content,A patience, and a vast indifferenceTo what men say of me and what men fearTo say. There was a work to be begun,And when the Voice, that I have heard so long,Announced as in a thousand silencesAn end of preparation, I beganThe coming work of death which is to be,That life may be. There is no other wayThan the old way of war for a new landThat will not know itself and is tonightA stranger to itself, and to the worldA more prodigious upstart among statesThan I was among men, and so shall beTill they are told and told, and told again;For men are children, waiting to be told,And most of them are children all their lives.The good God in his wisdom had them so,That now and then a madman or a seerMay shake them out of their complacencyAnd shame them into deeds. The major fileSee only what their fathers may have seen,Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing.I do not say it matters what they saw.Now and again to some lone soul or otherGod speaks, and there is hanging to be done,—As once there was a burning of our bodiesAlive, albeit our souls were sorry fuel.But now the fires are few, and we are poisedAccordingly, for the state’s benefit,A few still minutes between heaven and earth.The purpose is, when they have seen enoughOf what it is that they are not to see,To pluck me as an unripe fruit of treason,And then to fling me back to the same earthOf which they are, as I suppose, the flower—Not given to know the riper fruit that waitsFor a more comprehensive harvesting.
Yes, may they come, and soon. Again I say,May they come soon!—before too many of themShall be the bloody cost of our defection.When hell waits on the dawn of a new state,Better it were that hell should not wait long,—Or so it is I see it who should seeAs far or farther into time tonightThan they who talk and tremble for me now,Or wish me to those everlasting firesThat are for me no fear. Too many firesHave sought me out and seared me to the bone—Thereby, for all I know, to temper meFor what was mine to do. If I did illWhat I did well, let men say I was mad;Or let my name for ever be a questionThat will not sleep in history. What men sayI was will cool no cannon, dull no sword,Invalidate no truth. Meanwhile, I was;And the long train is lighted that shall burn,Though floods of wrath may drench it, and hot feetMay stamp it for a slight time into smokeThat shall blaze up again with growing speed,Until at last a fiery crash will comeTo cleanse and shake a wounded hemisphere,And heal it of a long malignityThat angry time discredits and disowns.Tonight there are men saying many things;And some who see life in the last of meWill answer first the coming call to death;For death is what is coming, and then life.I do not say again for the dull sakeOf speech what you have heard me say before,But rather for the sake of all I am,And all God made of me. A man to dieAs I do must have done some other workThan man’s alone. I was not after glory,But there was glory with me, like a friend,Throughout those crippling years when friends were few,And fearful to be known by their own namesWhen mine was vilified for their approval.Yet friends they are, and they did what was givenTheir will to do; they could have done no more.I was the one man mad enough, it seems,To do my work; and now my work is over.And you, my dear, are not to mourn for me,Or for your sons, more than a soul should mournIn Paradise, done with evil and with earth.There is not much of earth in what remainsFor you; and what there may be left of itFor your endurance you shall have at lastIn peace, without the twinge of any fearFor my condition; for I shall be doneWith plans and actions that have heretoforeMade your days long and your nights ominousWith darkness and the many distancesThat were between us. When the silence comes,I shall in faith be nearer to you thenThan I am now in fact. What you see nowIs only the outside of an old man,Older than years have made him. Let him die,And let him be a thing for little grief.There was a time for service, and he served;And there is no more time for anythingBut a short gratefulness to those who gaveTheir scared allegiance to an enterpriseThat has the name of treason—which will serveAs well as any other for the present.There are some deeds of men that have no names,And mine may like as not be one of them.I am not looking far for names tonight.The King of Glory was without a nameUntil men gave him one; yet there He was,Before we found Him and affronted HimWith numerous ingenuities of evil,Of which one, with His aid, is to be sweptAnd washed out of the world with fire and blood.
Once I believed it might have come to passWith a small cost of blood; but I was dreaming—Dreaming that I believed. The Voice I heardWhen I left you behind me in the north,—To wait there and to wonder and grow oldOf loneliness,—told only what was best,And with a saving vagueness, I should knowTill I knew more. And had I known even then—After grim years of search and suffering,So many of them to end as they began—After my sickening doubts and estimationsOf plans abandoned and of new plans vain—After a weary delving everywhereFor men with every virtue but the Vision—Could I have known, I say, before I left youThat summer morning, all there was to know—Even unto the last consuming wordThat would have blasted every mortal answerAs lightning would annihilate a leaf,I might have trembled on that summer morning;I might have wavered; and I might have failed.
And there are many among men todayTo say of me that I had best have wavered.So has it been, so shall it always be,For those of us who give ourselves to dieBefore we are so parcelled and approvedAs to be slaughtered by authority.We do not make so much of what they sayAs they of what our folly says of us;They give us hardly time enough for that,And thereby we gain much by losing little.Few are alive to-day with less to loseThan I who tell you this, or more to gain;And whether I speak as one to be destroyedFor no good end outside his own destruction,Time shall have more to say than men shall hearBetween now and the coming of that harvestWhich is to come. Before it comes, I go—By the short road that mystery makes longFor man’s endurance of accomplishment.I shall have more to say when I am dead.