Footfall and Footprint
POETRY, which celebrates the human eye, lip, cheek, and even the hand, rather slights the foot, the weight-bearing and earthtouching part of the ambitious human frame. Sculpture and painting, in forgetting its uses, may reveal its beauty, but it may count itself lucky if it win a stanza, a line, or even a phrase from unobservant poetry. Poetry, itself all rhythm, will look at that plodding wayfarer only when the foot, forgetting labor, becomes itself rhythmical, and acquires in the dance the half-touching interest of a peasant on a holiday.
Yet the walk of man is itself a thing fit to ensnare the imagination. It is an interplay in which each foot is by turns anchor and propeller, in which each lifts and lowers itself as if to show alternately man’s bondage to the earth and his fealty to the air. But it is not of the walk itself that I care now to speak, but of two of its minor consequences which have always greatly moved the souls of poets. Sometimes, when the foot strikes the earth, there is a sound, and sometimes, when the foot leaves the earth, there is a print. These are effects of the step. The sound is the proclamation of the step, and the print is its record. Neither of these is inseparable from the movement: the step must fall on a hard surface to beget a sound, and on a soft, though not a fluid, surface to bequeath a print. All the words that convey these meanings are among the most beautiful and touching in the language — footstep, footmark, footprint, footfall; whereas the other compounds of the word ‘foot’—footgear, footnote, football, footstove — are, like the foot itself, prosaic; we might even say pedestrian. It is an amusing fact that, though the spring of Aganippe came from the foot of Pegasus, the only unpoetical poetical thing about poetry is its feet.
The foot of the unshod animal is padded and soundless, lest he rouse his enemy or warn his prey; but the foot of man, grown anxious, and fearing the thorn or the flint or the snow or even the water, has found a sheath for itself, and on the street, which his hand has paved with stones, his foot, which he has cased in leather, makes a noise. The sound is the trace in the air; the print is the trace on the earth. The sound vanishes instantly, and, since what is hard cannot take and what is soft cannot keep, the print, too, is speedily effaced. But the mark in the sand will wait for the next breaker, the mark in the snow for the next noontide or the next snowfall before its fleeting record is expunged. Sometimes the soft printed surface becomes hard, and then one cycle may read another cycle’s footprint in a beast’s or bird’s.
A footprint may be the sign of danger (we all remember Crusoe), the token of death, the seal of crime. Lucy Gray’s parents tracked her footmarks into the middle of the plank across the stream, ‘and further there were none!’ A man’s shoeprint in a lonely spot may be the first loop in a coil of rope that is to tighten with destructive certainty about his throat. The little hollow which his foot makes may scoop out a pit which shall gape for the entire body. The slayer puts his foot into a pool of blood, and puts the blood-marked foot into a drift of snow. The red blood leaves its mark on the white snow. The earth turns and the hours glide, and morning brings a torch by which the red script on the white scroll may be deciphered.
In lonely and empty places the sound of steps is sombrely enlarged, and silence drinks it in as a dry ground laps moisture. On paved ways at midnight, in the corridors of a deserted building, the foot has, as it were, secret understandings and whispered converse with the conspiring stones. Lie awake at night, and hear the tread of a man on the pavement underneath the open window. The sound begins, waxes, culminates, declines, ceases; the curve is the sad curve of life itself. The spell of these measured and divided sounds has bound you for ten seconds to a being of your race to whom you are, and shall be, nothing, whose name you may never know, and whose face you may never see.
The impressiveness of the fact of presence is often heightened when that presence is stripped of all the leafage of individuality, and reduced to an edge-like narrowness of vivid symbol. Reduce the ocean to a gray line, reduce the mountain to a white vertex, and its mere being, its Adsum, if I may so call it, is somehow reënforced. The man himself in his concrete person hardly testifies to his own presence so powerfully as those two august witnesses, the air with its passing outcry, ‘He is here,’ and the earth with its soundless record, ‘There he was.’ These are more than documents; they are spells: they teach us that the plodding foot is a magician.
O. W. FIRKINS