Blanche Edith Baughan

“ I hurt but to help you.
Trust the touch of your mother—the touch of your fellow-sinner!
Together let’s face it! It’s there, it has to be faced. Look, my dearest—
You’ve done it, you cannot undo it.
But—what will you do with it next?
“Ay, son, take courage with me, for there is a way from transgression,
Right straight up into triumph. What will you make of your sin?
Sin that it was, ay, and shame that it is, and blemish eternal.
What else too shall it be? What else eternal become? ”

“ Mother to all sad hearts, to all lives crippled or lonely,
Mother-confessor to many—lads and girls in their hot shame,
Husbands and wives in their cares....Recluse, yet comrade....Self-outcast,
Yet welcome sharer of sorrows, understander of souls....
The sick demanded her touch, the eyes of the dying her deep eyes;
Like Fog in face of a breeze, misery melted before her,
Courage came with her coming, cheer remain’d when she went.—
But, for her, what comrade, what comfort, what understander?
Irony! only himself. ”

“ Not out of Touch, even so....but we’ve quick air in our lungs yet
To bring us back to the air and the beautiful shining surface;
We’re for the sun again—and we’ll not have been down for nothing?
Outcast of men, ay, and justly! still the Omnipotent Mercy
Can meet us down in the depths, and turn us too to Its Use. ”

“ For her son, her second betrayer, her worst of failures! O Death, Death,
Death! Make a merciful end. Finish the failure for ever.
....Would it finish it, though, or only carry it further?
She hadn’t slunk to Death....
“Boy, I have been through it all!” O,
Awful, heroic cry of that comrade true to the utmost,
Stripping her soul for his sake, of that splendid, intrepid sufferer,
Ruler of ruin and wreck, of that sinner sainted and shining,
All for hard honour still, and never-be-done requital!
“Your fellow-sinner!” Not his, the cur and the coward! “Your Mother!” ”

“ Seen as a vision, how bright! in those nights of desperate darkness,
Truly in sight now at last, and to-morrow, to-morrow, thank Heaven!
Last of all sights to be! for it fronted fathomless water,
The hiding sea would be all, and life and self-loathing done!....
....A honey-bee boom’d o’er the tussock, and sipp’d at the blossoming shamrock;
He look’d and beheld the blossoms bruis’d by his twisting fingers,
Ruin’d at start of the spring; and his eyes grew cloudy with pity
(He was easily touch’d, fine-fibred) ; then, dark with a bitter pity
For himself and his own spring, spoil’d! ”