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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Eda Lou Walton

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

I Would Be Free

Eda Lou Walton

From “Beyond Sorrow”

I WOULD be free of you, my body;

Free of you, too, my little soul.

I am so tired of this mocking hobby,

I am so tired of this imaged whole.

I would be neither base nor godly.

Loathing myself, could I bear then

To see all life and suffering oddly

Twisted and shaped to the needs of men?

I would be neither my own nor another’s:

I would not tend for myself, nor hate

The flame of silence that in me smothers

Under the crackling smoke of fate.

God!—what is there for such as in me

Cannot be two and are not whole?

Within the spirit dwells the body,

Upon the body feeds the soul.