180 Travel poems

to Doug & Jan Oliver “I order you to operate, I was not made to suffer.” Probing for old wills, and friendships, for to free to New York City, to be in History, New York City being History at that time.” “And I traded my nights for Intensity; & I barter my right to Gold; & I’d traded my eyes much earlier, when I was circa say seven years old for ears to hear Who was speaking, & just exactly who was being told….” & I’m glad I hear your words so clearly & I would not have done it differently & I’m amused at such simplicity, even so, inside each & every door. And now I’m with you, instantly, & I’ll see you tomorrow night, and I see you constantly, hopefully though one or the other of us is often, to the body-mind’s own self more or less out of sight! Taking walks down any streets, High Street, Main Street, walk past my doors! Newtown; Nymph Rd (on the Mesa); Waveland Meeting House Lane, in old Southampton; or BelleVue Road in England, etcetera Other roads; Manhattan; see them there where open or shut up behind “I’ve traded sweet lines for answers …” They don’t serve me anymore.” They still serve me on the floor. Or, as now, as floor. Now we look out the windows, go in & out the doors. The Door. (That front door which was but & then at that time My door). I closed it On the wooing of Helen. “And so we left schools for her.” For She is not one bit fiction; & she is easy to see; & she leaves me small room For contradiction. And she is not alone; & she is not one bit lonely in the large high room, & invention is just vanity, which is plain. She is the heart’s own body, the body’s own mind in itself self-contained. & she talks like you; & she has created truly not single-handedly Our tragic thing, America. And though I would be I am not afraid of her, & you also not. You, yourself, I, Me, myself, me. And no, we certainly have not pulled down our vanity: but We wear it lightly here, here where I traded evenly, & even gladly health, for sanity; here where we live day-by-day on the same spot. My English friends, whom I love & miss, we talk to ourselves here, & we two rarely fail to remember, although we write seldom, & so must seem gone forever. In the stained sky over this morning the clouds seem about to burst What is being remembering Is how we are, together. Like you we are always bothered, except by the worst; & we are living as with you we also were fired, only, mostly, by changes in the weather. For Oh dear hearts, When precious baby blows her fuse / it’s just our way of keeping amused. That we offer of & as excuse. Here’s to you. All the very best. What’s your pleasure? Cheers.

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk? How many big horn sheep? It's spring, and soon they'll be gone above timberline, climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes with spruce and Douglas fir are home. He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that. Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles, too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks in mountains, too many icy spots in spring. Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard, but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband, leaning into a downhill curve and gone.

1 Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road. The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them. (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens, I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go, I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them, I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.) 2 You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe that much unseen is also here. Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial, The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted, None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me. 3 You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me. You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges! You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships! You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs! You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards! You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much! You doors and ascending steps! you arches! You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings! From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me, From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me. 4 The earth expanding right hand and left hand, The picture alive, every part in its best light, The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted, The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road. O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me? Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost? Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me? O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, You express me better than I can express myself, You shall be more to me than my poem. I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also, I think I could stop here myself and do miracles, I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me, I think whoever I see must be happy. 5 From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently,but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. I inhale great draughts of space, The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me, I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you, I will recruit for myself and you as I go, I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them, Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me, Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me. 6 Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me, Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d it would not astonish me. Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. Here a great personal deed has room, (Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men, Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.) Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul. Now I re-examine philosophies and religions, They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents. Here is realization, Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him, The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them. Only the kernel of every object nourishes; Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me? Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me? Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos; Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers? Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls? 7 Here is the efflux of the soul, The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions, These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they? Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank? Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? (I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;) What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers? What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side? What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by and pause? What gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s good-will? what gives them to be free to mine? 8 The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness, I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times, Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged. Here rises the fluid and attaching character, The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman, (The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.) Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old, From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments, Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact. 9 Allons! whoever you are come travel with me! Traveling with me you find what never tires. The earth never tires, The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. Allons! we must not stop here, However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here, However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here, However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while. 10 Allons! the inducements shall be greater, We will sail pathless and wild seas, We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail. Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements, Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity; Allons! from all formules! From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests. The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the burial waits no longer. Allons! yet take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance, None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health, Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself, Only those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies, No diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here. (I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, We convince by our presence.) 11 Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes, These are the days that must happen to you: You shall not heap up what is call’d riches, You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve, You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart, You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you, What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting, You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you. 12 Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them! They too are on the road—they are the swift and majestic men—they are the greatest women, Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas, Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land, Habituès of many distant countries, habituès of far-distant dwellings, Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers, Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore, Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children, Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins, Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious years each emerging from that which preceded it, Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases, Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days, Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood, Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content, Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood, Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death. 13 Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless, To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights, To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to, Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys, To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it, To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it, To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, however long but it stretches and waits for you, To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither, To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it, To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens, To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through, To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go, To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, to gather the love out of their hearts, To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you, To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls. All parts away for the progress of souls, All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe. Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance. Forever alive, forever forward, Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied, Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men, They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go, But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great. Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth! You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you. Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen! It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it. Behold through you as bad as the rest, Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people, Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces, Behold a secret silent loathing and despair. No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession, Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes, Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors, In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly, Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom, everywhere, Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones, Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers, Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself, Speaking of any thing else but never of itself. 14 Allons! through struggles and wars! The goal that was named cannot be countermanded. Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature? Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion, He going with me must go well arm’d, He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions. 15 Allons! the road is before us! It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d! Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d! Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d! Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher! Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law. Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Only the wanderer Knows England's graces, Or can anew see clear Familiar faces. And who loves joy as he That dwells in shadows? Do not forget me quite, O Severn meadows.

Along the campo, Manin’s bronze winged lion prowled among the tanned intruders, licking their hands. Pools of iridescent shellfish lay open in the restaurant window, a shop of otherworldly opals, the mussels’ sheen the skies of a closed heaven, crabs flat on their backs, their armor intricate trapped plates and escapements. The squid slumped in its own ink, the octopus appalled in its slime. Many and ingenious are the postures of death. But look! There, in a corner, beneath a willowware plate, a lone crab clicked its claws, creeping over a casket of walleyed fish, through a valley of oysters keeping their counsel, only to shift warily under the shadow of a wine bottle. Which saint, O saints, watches over the saintly crab? The man of forks and spears, the man of arrows? In the Ca’ d’Oro, the stiffened Sebastian takes each arrow through his flesh like a skewer. He wears a little napkin around his middle. Saint, watch over the fragile boat of the runaway crab. Let him steal his way back to the green lagoon, go floating down the Grand Canal on his own motoscafo. Let him take second life, a later martyrdom. Let him wave his bent claws in a mockery of farewell, lest we eat in his hollow shell his captive meat.

There, in that lost corner of the ordnance survey. Drive through the vanity — two pubs and a garage — of Satley, then right, cross the A68 past down-at-heel farms and a quarry, you can't miss it, a 'T' instead of a 'plus' where the road meets a wall. If it's a usual day there'll be freezing wind, and you'll stumble climbing the stile (a ladder, really) as you pull your hat down and zip up your jacket. Out on the moor, thin air may be strong enough to knock you over, but if you head into it downhill, you can shelter in the wide, cindery trench of an old leadmine-to-Consett railway. You may have to share it with a crowd of dirty supercilious-looking ewes, who will baaa and cut jerkily away after posting you blank stares from their foreign eyes. One winter we came across five steaming, icicle-hung cows. But in summer, when the heather's full of nests, you'll hear curlews following you, raking your memory, maybe, with their cries; or, right under you nose, a grouse will whirr up surprised, like a poet startled by a line when it comes to her sideways. No protection is offered by trees — Hawthorn the English call May, a few struggling birches. But of wagtails and yellowhammers, plenty, and peewits who never say peewit, more a minor,go'way, go'way. Who was he, Salter? Why was this his gate? A pedlars' way, they carried salt to meat. The place gives tang to survival, its unstoppable view, a reservoir, ruins of the lead mines, new forestry pushing from the right, the curlew.

In this blue light I can take you there, snow having made me a world of bone seen through to. This is my house, my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor’s lemontrees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory. A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls. There’s milk on the air, ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line—bodies and wings—to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It’s a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.

I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched where the westerly winds and the traveler’s checks the evensong of salesmen the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases where no one speaks English. I go separately It is the wind, the rubber wind when we brush our teeth in the way station a climate to beard. What forks these roads? Who clammers o’er the twain? What murmurs and rustles in the distance in the white branches where the light is whipped piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard? I go separately We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice She is coming toward us like a session of pines in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen, O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers whose wagon is perilously rapt.

Everyone comes here from a long way off (is a line from a poem I read last night). *     *     * Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked. (Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.) His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled. *     *     * Alternatively: A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theater watching a movie in which a man and a woman, old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road. The woman is describing the end of her marriage and sobbing, shaking her head and laughing and sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening, his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance, and because, in the restaurant before the film the woman had been describing the end of her marriage and cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theater or on the mountain road, and when the timber truck comes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch. *     *     * He found that it was no good trying to tell what happened that day. Everything he said seemed fictional the moment that he said it, the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said as she was leaving, and why it was important for him to explain that the car had been parked under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety and blurred the trees looked through the windshield; not, he said, that making fictions might not be the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling was already seeing itself as a character, and a character, he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment, even as he kept wanting to explain to someone, to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain on the side window didn’t even quiver. *     *     * Names for involuntary movements of the body— squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder— sound like a law firm in Dickens: “Mr. Flinch took off his black gloves as if he were skinning his hands.” “Quiver dipped the nib of his pen into the throat of the inkwell.” *     *     * The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him to call the city medical examiner’s office, but you only got a recorded voice on weekends. *     *     * Setup without the punchline: Three greenhorns are being measured for suits by a very large tailor on Hester Street. *     *     * Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me; their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing. What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked. Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other. Or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas. *     *     * “Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely, and angry,” said the friend who knew her better, “and she’d run out of stories. Or come to the one story.” *     *     * It is good to sit down to birthday cake with children, who think it is the entire point of life and who, therefore, respect each detail of the ceremony. There ought to be a rule, he thought, for who gets to lick the knife that cuts the cake and the rule should have its pattern somewhere in the winter stars. Which do you add to the tea first, he’d asked, the sugar or the milk? And the child had said, instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cool and angular as words:angular,sidereal.) *     *     * Stories about the distribution of wealth: Once upon a time there was an old man and an old women who were very, very poor. *     *     * How Eldie Got Her Name The neighborhood had been so dangerous, she said, there was one summer when the mailmen refused to deliver the mail. Her mother never appeared and her grandmother, who had bought a handgun for protection and had also taught her how to use it, would walk her to the post office for the sweet, singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled, or that she imagined smelled, of Florida. She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruder climbing in the window. The roar, she said, was tremendous and she doesn’t know to this day whether she hit the man or not. (A big-boned young woman, skin the color of the inside of some light-colored hazelnut confection, auburn eyes, some plucked string of melancholy radiating from her whole body when she spoke.) Did her mama come back? They had asked. She never came back. The mail started up again but the letters stopped. Turned out she was good in school, and that was what saved her. She loved the labor of schoolwork. Loved finishing a project and contemplating the neatness of her script. Her grandmother shook her head, sometimes, amused and proud, and called her “Little Diligence.” *     *     * Punchline without the setup: And the three nuns from Immaculate Conception nodded and smiled as they passed, because they thought he was addressing them in Latin. *     *     * He had known, as long as he’d known anything, that he had a father somewhere. When he was twelve, his mother told him why he had no shadow. *     *     * Because she, not her sister, answered the door, she was the first to hear the news. *     *     * A Ballad: He loved to watch that woman sew. She let her hair grow long for show. Riddle’s a needle (a refrain might go) and plainly said is thread. *     *     * She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too. She’d had a go at putting herself together; she had always had the confidence that, with a face like hers, a few touches to represent the idea of a put-together look would do, like some set designer’s genius minimalism. It had a slightly harridan effect and he remembered that it wasn’t what was headlong or slapdash about her, but the way they gestured, like a quotation, at an understanding of elegance it would have been boring to spell out, that had at first dazzled him about her. He felt himself stirring at this recognition, and at a certain memory that attended it, and then laughed at the thought that he had actually stimulated himself with an analysis of her style, and she said, as if she were remembering the way he could make her insecure, “What? What are you smiling about?” and he said, “Nothing.” And she said, “Oh, yes. Right. I remember nothing.” *     *     * Two jokes walk into a bar. A cage went in search of a bird. A boy walks out in the morning with a gun. Three rabbis walk into a penguin. *     *     * In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina, and one night it was very warm and they could not sleep for the heat and the stillness, and they went outside, beyond the wall of their parents’ garden and into a meadow. It was a dark night, moonless, and the stars were so thick they seemed to shudder, and the sisters stood a long time in the sweet smell of the cooling grasses, looking at the sky and listening in the silence. After a while they heard a stirring and saw that a pair of bright eyes was watching them from the woods’ edge. “Maybe it’s their friend, the bear,” one of the children said. “I don’t like this story,” said the other.

1896 Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all— The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world. Speakin’ in general, I ’ave found them good For such as cannot use one bed too long, But must get ’ence, the same as I ’ave done, An’ go observin’ matters till they die. What do it matter where or ’ow we die, So long as we’ve our ’ealth to watch it all— The different ways that different things are done, An’ men an’ women lovin’ in this world; Takin’ our chances as they come along, An’ when they ain’t, pretendin’ they are good? In cash or credit—no, it aren’t no good; You ’ave to ’ave the ’abit or you’d die, Unless you lived your life but one day long, Nor didn’t prophesy nor fret at all, But drew your tucker some’ow from the world, An’ never bothered what you might ha’ done. But, Gawd, what things are they I ’aven’t done? I’ve turned my ’and to most, an’ turned it good, In various situations round the world— For ’im that doth not work must surely die; But that's no reason man should labour all ’Is life on one same shift—life’s none so long. Therefore, from job to job I’ve moved along. Pay couldn’t ’old me when my time was done, For something in my ’ead upset it all, Till I ’ad dropped whatever ’twas for good, An’, out at sea, be’eld the dock-lights die, An’ met my mate—the wind that tramps the world! It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done, An’ turn another—likely not so good; But what you’re after is to turn ’em all. Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done— Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good. So write, before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’