Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“ Society holds not its present height
Merely that you may bring a child to light;
But you and yours live only in the plan
That’s working out a higher kind of man;
A higher kind of life, that shall let grow
New powers and nobler duties than you know.
Rise to the thought! Live in the widening race!
Help make the State more like God’s dwelling-place!
New paths for life divine, as yet untrod,—
A social body for the soul of God! HOW WOULD YOU?
Half of our misery, half our pain,
Half the dark background of our self-reproach,
Is thought of how the world has sinned before. ”

“ Whom shall we blame?
’Tis not that one alone is dead,
And these bereft.
For her, for them, we grieve indeed;
But there are other hearts that bleed!
All up and down the world so wide
We suffer, Lord, on every side,—
We who are left.
See now, we bend our stricken hearts,
Patient and still,
Knowing thy laws are wholly just,
Knowing thy love commands our trust,
Knowing that good is God alone,
That pain and sorrow are our own,
And seeking out of all our pain
To struggle up to God again—
Teach us thy will! ”

“ I followed Love to his intensest centre,
And lost him utterly when fastened there;
I let him go and ceased my selfish seeking,
Turning my heart to all earth’s voices speaking,
And found him everywhere.
Love like the rain that falls on just and unjust,
Love like the sunshine, measureless and free,
From each to all, from all to each, to live in;
And, in the world’s glad love so gladly given,
Came heart’s true love to me! TOO MUCH.
There are who die without love, never seeing
The clear eyes shining, the bright wings fleeing. ”

“ For our blind misdirection, our death and disease;
28For the grief of our childhood, the loss and the wrong;
For the pain of our childhood, the agony strong;
For the shame and the sin and the sorrow thereof—
Dare you say it is love?
Love? First give freedom,—the right of the brute!
The air with its sunshine, the earth with its fruit.
Love? First give wisdom,—intelligent care,
That shall help to bring out all the good that is there.
Love? First give justice! There’s nothing above!
And then you may love! TO A GOOD MANY.
O blind and selfish! ”

“ And the fierce pain of hurting those we love
When love meets truth, and truth must ride above?
But the best courage man has ever shown
Is daring to cut loose and think alone.
Dark as the unlit chambers of clear space
Where light shines back from no reflecting face.
16Our sun’s wide glare, our heaven’s shining blue,
We owe to fog and dust they fumble through;
And our rich wisdom that we treasure so
Shines from the thousand things that we don’t know.
But to think new—it takes a courage grim
As led Columbus over the world’s rim. ”

“ That shall laugh with our waking and watch with our sleep,
The patience of age, the keen honor of youth,
To guide us in doing and teach us in truth,
With the garnered ripe fruit of the world at our feet,
Both the bitter and sweet!
What is this that you offer? One man’s narrow purse!
One woman’s strained life, and a heart straining worse! ”

“ Hence the pure light of long-enduring love,
Lives blended slowly, softly, into one.
Hence civic pride, and glory in our states,
And the fierce thrill of patriotic fire
When millions feel as one!
When we shall learn
To live together fully; when each man
And woman works in conscious interchange
With all the world,—union as wide as man,—
No human soul can ever suffer more
The devastating grief of loneliness. ”

“ With the whole world moving slowly to the music of his will.
Sought, and found not for my seeking, till the sweet quest led me further,
And before me rose the temple, marble-based and gold above,
Where the long procession marches
’Neath the incense-clouded arches
In the world-compelling worship of the mighty God of Love.
Yea, I passed with bated breath to the holiest of holies,
And I lifted the great curtain from the Inmost,—the Most Fair,—
56Eager for the joy of finding,
For the glory, beating, blinding,
Meeting but an empty darkness; darkness, silence—nothing there.
Where is Love? ”

“ FROM CALIFORNIA.
When ragged lines of passing days go by,
Crowding and hurried, broken-linked and slow,
Some sobbing pitifully as they pass,
Some angry-hot and fierce, some angry cold,
Some raging and some wailing, and again
The fretful days one cannot read aright,—
Then truly, when the fair days smile on us,
We feel that loveliness with sharper touch
And grieve to lose it for the next day’s chance.
And so men question—they who never know
If beauty comes or horror, pain or joy—
If we, whose sky is peace, whose hours are glad,
Find not our happiness monotonous! ”

“ Love coming to new babies while the first
Still needed mother’s care, and therefore love,—
Love lasting longer because childhood did.
Motherhood: Semi-civilized, intense,
Fierce with brute passion, narrow with the range
Of slavish lives to meanest service bowed;
Devoted—to the sacrifice of life;
Jealous beyond belief, and ignorant
Even of what should keep the child alive.
Love spreading with the spread of human needs,
The child’s new, changing, ever-growing wants,
Yet seeking like brute mothers of the past
To give all things to her own child herself.
Loving to the exclusion of all else ”

“ We cannot praise amiss;
But not in vain was sown the seed;
Look wide where thousands toil and bleed,
Where men meet death for common need—
Hath no man loved but this?
Yea, all men love; we love to-day
Wide as the human race has sway,
Ever more deep, more dear;
No stream,—an everlasting sea,
Beating and throbbing to be free,
To give it forth there needs must be
One Christmas all the year!
48 THE LIVING GOD.
The Living God. The God that made the world
Made it, and stood aside to watch and wait,
Arranging a predestined plan
To save the erring soul of man—
Undying destiny—unswerving fate. ”

“ The world’s sin. Thou wilt weep; and thy mother must dry
The tears of the world lest her darling should cry.
I will do it—God helping!
And I stand not alone. I will gather a band
Of all loving mothers from land unto land.
Our children are part of the world! do ye hear?
They are one with the world—we must hold them all dear!
Love all for the child’s sake!
For the sake of my child I must hasten to save
All the children on earth from the jail and the grave.
For so, and so only, I lighten the share
Of the pain of the world that my darling must bear—
Even so, and so only! SERVICES.
She was dead. ”

“ Is not for one, or two, but for them all.
Love that can wound love, for its higher need;
Love that can leave love though the heart may bleed;
Love that can lose love; family, and friend;
Yet steadfastly live, loving, to the end.
A love that asks no answer, that can live
Moved by one burning, deathless force,—to give.
Love, strength, and courage. Courage, strength, and love,
The heroes of all time are built thereof. FIRE WITH FIRE.
There are creeping flames in the near-by grass;
There are leaping flames afar;
And the wind’s black breath
17Is hot with death,—
The worst of the deaths that are! ”

“ Then, measuring her love by what they need,
Gives, from the heart of modern motherhood.
Gives first, as tree to bear God’s highest fruit,
A clean, strong body, perfect and full grown,
Fair for the purpose of its womanhood,
Not for light fancy of a lower mind;
Gives a clear mind, athletic, beautiful,
Dispassionate, unswerving from the truth;
Gives a great heart that throbs with human love,
As she would wish her son to love the world. ”

“ To help the groaning world, to serve the state,
To be so wise—so strong?
And are you quite convinced this is the way,
The only way a woman’s duty lies—
Knowing all women so have shut their eyes?
Seeing the world to-day?
Have you no dream of life in fuller store?
Of growing to be more than that you are?
Doing the things you now do better far,
Yet doing others—more?
131Losing no love, but finding as you grew
That as you entered upon nobler life
You so became a richer, sweeter wife,
A wiser mother too?
What holds you? ”

“ Warm and wide—strong and high!
In the name of the mother that bore us,
We will live! We will die! IN MOTHER-TIME.
When woman looks at woman with the glory in her eyes,
When eternity lies open like a scroll,
145When immortal life is being felt,—the life that never dies,—
And the triumph of it ringeth
And the sweetness of it singeth
In the soul,
Then we come to California, the Garden of the Lord,
Through all its leagues of endless blossoming;
And we sing, we sing together, to the whole world’s deep accord—
And we feel each other praying
Over what the flowers are saying
As we sing. ”

“ That to love thy God is to love thy brother,
And to serve the Lord is to serve each other,—
Then Christ was born in vain!
If we have not learned that one man’s life
In all men lives again;
That each man’s battle, fought alone,
Is won or lost for every one,—
Then Christ hath lived in vain!
If we have not learned that death’s no break
In life’s unceasing chain;
That the work in one life well begun
In others is finished, by others is done,—
Then Christ hath died in vain!
44If we have not learned of immortal life,
And a future free from pain ”

“ To live on air and spare the tender grass,
And stop him, somehow, when he grew so thick
That even air fell short. Or would you have
All plants and animals, and make them change
By some metempsychosis not called death?
For, having them, you have to have them change,
For growth is change, and life is growth; and change
Implies—in this world—what we miscall pain. ”

“ When love has gone from us is loneliness.
The crying of a little child at night
In the big dark is crowding loneliness.
Slow death of woman on a Kansas farm;
The ache of those who think beyond their time;
Pain unassuaged of isolated lives,—
All this is loneliness.
Oh, we who are one body of one soul!
Great soul of man born into social form! ”

“ Strange is the game the world doth play,—
Rouge et Noir, with the counters gold,
Red with blood and black with sin;
Few and fewer are they that win
As the ages pass untold.
181Said the strong children to the weaker ones,
“Ye lose in laziness! ye lose in sleep!
Play faster now and make the counters spin!
Play well, as we, and ye in time shall win!
Play fast! Play deep!”
Strange is the game of Rouge et Noir,—
Never a point have the little ones won.
The winners are strong and flushed with gain,
The losers are weak with want and pain,
And still the game goes on. ”

“ No way for this wonderful love to avail?
God in Heaven—O teach me!
My prayer has been answered. The pain thou must bear
Is the pain of the world’s life which thy life must share.
Thou art one with the world—though I love thee the best ”

“ No escape under heaven!
138Yet you feel, being human. You shrink from the pain
That each child, born a woman, must suffer again.
From the strongest of bonds heart can feel, man can shape,
You cannot rebel, or appeal, or escape.
You must bear and endure. If the heart cannot sleep,
And the pain groweth bitter,—too bitter,—then weep!
For you feel, being human.
And she wept, being woman. ”

“ The People, countenancing pain
By willing presence there;
The People—you may shriek in vain—
Protest, rebel, beseech, complain—
The People do not care!
Each man and woman feels the weight
Of their own private share;
But for the suffering of the state,
That falls on all men soon or late,
The People do not care! IF A MAN MAY NOT EAT NEITHER CAN HE WORK.
How can he work? ”

“ And you don’t amount to very much alone,
24Than to be yourself as spotless as a baby one year old,
Your domestic habits wholly free from blame,
While the company you stand with
Is a thing to curse a land with,
And your public life is undiluted shame.
For the deeds men do together are what saves the world to-day—
By our common public work we stand or fall—
And your fraction of the sin
Of the office you are in
Is the sin that’s going to damn you, after all! ”

“ Are we not homes? And is not all therein?
Wring dry the world to meet our wide desires!
We crown all life! We are the aim of God! A COMMON INFERENCE.
A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep;
Heavy with flowers; full of life asleep;
Thrilling with insect voices; thick with stars;
9No cloud between the dewdrops and red Mars;
The small earth whirling softly on her way,
The moonbeams and the waterfalls at play;
A million million worlds that move in peace,
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves, and store of millet seeds. ”

“ Food he ate for pleasure, and it slew him with diseases!
Wine he drank for gladness, and it led the way to crime!
And woman? He will hold her—he will have her when he pleases—
And he never once hath seen her since the prehistoric time!
Gone the friend and comrade of the day when life was younger,
She who rests and comforts, she who helps and saves ”