"Why do I faint with love
Till the prairies dip and reel?
My heart is a kicking horse
Shod with Kentucky steel.
"No drop of my blood from north
Of Mason and Dixon's line.
And this racer in my breast
Tears my ribs for a sign."
It is only when one pauses to synthesize Lindsay's attitude to life, that one is struck by his amazing distrust of it. Life and (with even greater emphasis) passion are never accepted by him as conditions through which the ordinary world passes. They are, on the contrary, the wildest and most dangerous traps to snare the soul. In the earlier The Fireman's Ball, life is compared to a burning building, roaring with the flames of lust. The fire-obsession persists. Here in one of his most recent poems, Lindsay returns to the fantasy:
"The door has a bolt.
The window a grate.
O friend, we are trapped
In the factory, Fate!"
"The flames pierce the ceiling; the brands heap the floor"—and what can save us? anxiously inquires the poet of his sweetheart. And it is love, of all things—The Fire-Laddie, Love—which is to rescue them from life! It is a queer mixture of fascination and fear that keeps Lindsay dreaming of a spotless and almost sexless love. His emotions are not so much Buddhistic as determinedly innocent; the great sin is not growing wicked but growing up. In that charming echo of childhood For All Who Ever Sent Lace Valentines, Lindsay expresses this phase in another guise:
"The lion of loving,
The terrible lion,
Woke in the two
Long before they could wed.
