from
Notes on Self-Reliance : A Poem for Two Voices
August 31 2026
Man is his own lonely star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still,
impress upon the universal velvet.
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s
Honest Man’s Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf ’s teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
Let the child see the rain
Scatter hydrangeas round his grave
On his stone a plastic train
Passes through his dream hallways
I. How the Connection Between Events Shatters
I read the other day as summer sluiced through
fall, days without attendant nights, some verses writ-
ten by an eminent painter which were original and not
conventional. Always the soul hears always the soul an ad-
monition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The
sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought
they may contain, too igneous to touch, exchanged for
what crystallizes, what is left over. To believe your own
thought and turn away from knowledge, to believe that
what is true for you in your private heart is true for all
men and to be terribly ashamed,—that is genius in its
black splendor, how it stormed, a tree of crows. Speak
your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense;
for the inmost becomes the outmost fear—and our first
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the
Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to
each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and
Milton whom once we loved is that they set at naught
books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what
they thought, the broken tower of their imagination. A
man should learn to detect with his ear to the ground
for hoofbeats and watch that gleam of light divining rod
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages giving away
their position by fire. Yet he dismisses without notice
his thought, because it is his. Mine. In every work of ge-
nius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come
back to us like mysterious lights on the road beyond the
national border with a certain alienated majesty. Great
works of art have no more affecting lesson for us, noth-
ing else for us, than this. They teach us to abide by our
spontaneous impression with good-humored shopkeep-
er’s inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices
is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say
with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought
and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with
shame our own opinion from another. She said what I
knew to be true with some kindness, and with an open
heart I heard it, but still I was alone, as distant from the
stranger as the beloved.
There is a time in every man’s education when he
arrives at the healing conviction that envy is ignorance;
that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for
better for worse as his portion mostly worse; that though
the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing
corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on
that plot of ground which is given to him to till which
as he tills grows ever larger. The power which resides in
him is new in nature like a church with no shadows, and
none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does
he know until he has tried and failed. Not for nothing
one face, one character, one fact, one spirit, pagan icon,
makes much impression on him, and another none. It is
not without preestablished harmony, this sculpture in
the memory no shadows. The eye closed against the day
was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify
of that particular ray a difficult anniversary. Bravely let
him speak the utmost syllable of his confession. Words
turn to ice as they leave our lips. We but half express
ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea shatter
which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as
proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully im-
parted, but God will not have his work made manifest by
cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine.
A man is relieved and gay and finally sleeps when he has
put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he
has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. Your
insomnia.* It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In
the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends
stands at the riverbank washing her basket of clothes;
no invention, no intervention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for
you, the society of your contemporaries, how the con-
nection of events shatters. Great men have always done
so, and confided confined themselves childlike to the
genius of their age, betraying their perception that the
Eternal was stirring playing house at their heart, working
through their hands I sigh at, predominating in all their
being. And we are now all of us men, and must accept in
the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not
pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revo-
lution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants
to be noble clay like lobsters in a mossy tank under the
Almighty effort let us advance on Chaos and we don’t
have a shot in the Dark.
What pretty oracles sweet babbling brook nature
yields us on this text in the face and behavior of chil-
dren, babes, and even brutes. That divided and rebel
mind, that distrust of a sentiment you think you have it
all figured out because our arithmetic has computed the
strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have
not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet uncon-
quered unastonished, and when we look in their faces,
we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all
conform to it; yes; so that one babe commonly makes
four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it
no tears ’cause you’re here. So God has armed youth and
puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and
charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims
not to be put by, it will never, oh god, he will never stand
breathe by on itself his own. Do not think the youth has
no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. I’m
listening! Hark! in the next room who spoke so clear
and emphatic? It seems he knows how to speak to his
contemporaries. I’m going out! Bashful or bold then,
he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner as
he always would have been, and would disdain as much as
a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy
attitude of human nature. How is a boy the master of so-
ciety; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his
corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and
sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary
way of boys is Joe home?, as good, bad, interesting, silly,
eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about
consequences, about interests; he gives an independent,
genuine verdict. There were turkey vultures and a man
who sold cracked stones. You must court him; he does
not court you. He would not sign. But the man is as it
were clapped into jail by his consciousness. Can you pick
me up? As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat
he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or
the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter
into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Remember
that the fires of hell do not create light like our earthly
fires. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutral, god-
like independence! Regret. Who can thus lose all pledge
and, having observed, observe again from the same unaf-
fected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence are
you the boy’s mother?, must always be formidable, must
always engage the poet’s non-trivialities and the man’s
regards. Of such an immortal youth the force would be
felt, the taut bounce of a basketball on pavement in the
distance. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs,
which being seen to be not private but necessary, would
sink like darts into the ear of men and put them in fear.
When he gets where he’s going, will the people there be
strangers to him?
These are the voices voices which we hear in soli-
tude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into
the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against
the manhood of every one of its members like sunflow-
ers unturned in the years since they replaced the sun
with an artificial star. Society is a joint-stock company,
in which the members agree, for the better securing of
his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is
conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not re-
alities and creators, but names and customs.
* view one: facing north
the bridge that cross-binds
the territories, the sugar factory
at the foot, the lights.
view two: tiny windows
and how they diffuse
a mauve that afflicts
all the facets of your vision
continuously shifting,
unextinguished, the lights.
✳