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?

no cosmic throes of newborn continents,

no eras of the earth-encircling rain,—

uncounted scalding tears that fell and fell

on molten worlds that hotly dashed them back

in storms of fierce repudiated steam?

would you have made earth’s gems without the fire,

without the water, and without the weight

of crushing cubic miles of huddled rock?

would you have made one kind of plant to reign

in all the earth, growing mast high, and then

keep it undying so, and end of plants?

would you have made one kind of animal

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.

you, wiser, would have made mankind, no doubt,

not slowly, awfully, from dying brutes

up into living humanness at last,

but fresh as adam in the hebrew tale;

only you would have left the serpent out,

and left him, naked, in the garden still.

or somehow, dodging this, have still contrived

that he should learn the whole curriculum

and never miss a lesson—never fail—

be born, like buddha, all accomplished, wise.

would you have chosen to begin life old,

well-balanced, cautious, knowing where to step,

and so untortured by the memory

of childhood’s foolishness and youth’s mistakes?

or, born a child, to have experience

come to you softly without chance of loss,

recurring years each rolling to your hand

in blissful innocent unconsciousness?

o dreamers with a heaven and a hell

standing at either end of your wild rush

away from the large peace of knowing god,

can you not see that all of it is good?

good, with the postulate that this is life,—

and that is all we have to argue from.

childhood means error, the mistakes that teach;

but only rod and threat and nurse’s tale,

make childhood’s errors bring us shame and sin.

the race’s childhood grows by error too,

and we are not attained to manhood yet.

but grief and shame are only born of lies.

once see the lovely law that needs mistakes,

and you are young forever. this is life.