As to Being Alone

WHY did you hate to be by yourself,
And why were you sick of your own company?

Such the question, and this the answer:

I feared sublimity:
I was a little afraid of God:
Silence and space terrified me, bringing the thought of
what an irritable clod I was and how soon death
would gulp me down ...

This fear has reared cities:
The cowards flock together by the millions lest they
should be left alone for a half hour ...
With church, theater and school,
With office, mill and motor,
With a thousand cunning devices, and clever calls to
each other,
They escape from themselves to the crowd ...

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Oh, I have loved it all:
Snug rooms, the talk, the pleasant feast, the pictures:
The warm bath of humanity in which I relaxed and
soaked myself:
And never, I hope, shall I be without it—at times ...

But now myself calls me ...
The skies demand me, though it is but ten in the
morning:
The earth has an appointment with me, not to be
broken ...
I must accustom myself to the gaunt face of the Sub-
time ...
I must see what I really am, and what I am for,
And what this city is for, and the Earth and the stars
in their hurry ...

To turn out typewriters,
To invent a new breakfast food,
To devise a dance that was never danced until now,
To urge a new sanitation, and a swifter automobile—
Have the life-surging heavens no business but this?

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