Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In This Our World and Uncollected Poems

To a Good Many

18 | In This Our World 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! Confined as in prisons—held down as in caves— The teaching of tyrants—the service of slaves— The garments of falsehood and bondage—the weight Of your own evil state. And what is this brought as atonement for these? For our blind misdirection, our death and disease; For 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! Helpless as the beast Who sees no meaning in a soul released And given flesh to grow in—to work through! Think you that God has nothing else to do Than babble endlessly the same set phrase? Are life’s great spreading, upward-reaching ways Laid for the beasts to climb on till the top Is reached in you, you think, and there you stop! They were raised up, obedient to force Which lifted them, unwitting of their course. You have new power, new consciousness, new sight; You can help God! You stand in the great light Of seeing him at work. You can go on And walk with him, and feel the glory won. And here you sit, content to toil and strive To keep your kind of animal alive! Why, friends! God is not through! The universe is not complete in you. You’re just as bound to follow out his plan And sink yourself in ever-growing Man T H E WOR L D | 19 As ever were the earliest, crudest eggs To grow to vertebrates with arms and legs. 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. We, being one, one with all life, we feel The misdemeanors of uncounted time; We suffer in the foolishness and sins Of races just behind us,—burn with shame At their gross ignorance and murderous deeds; We suffer back of them in the long years Of squalid struggling savagery of beasts,— Beasts human and subhuman; back of them In helpless creatures eaten, hunted, torn; In submerged forests dying in the slime; And even back of that in endless years Of hot convulsions of dismembered lands, And slow constricting centuries of cold. So in our own lives, even to this day, We carry in the chambers of the mind The tale of errors, failures, and misdeeds That we call sins, of all our early lives. And the recurrent consciousness of this We call remorse. The unrelenting gauge, Now measuring past error,—this is shame. And in our feverish overconsciousness, A retroactive and preactive sense,— Fired with our self-made theories of sin,— We suffer, suffer, suffer—half alive, And half with the dead scars of suffering. Friends, how would you, perhaps, have made the world? Would you have balanced the great forces so Their interaction would have bred no shock? ...