A Reading of Life, with Other Poems

THE CAGEING OF ARES

Iliad, v. V. 385[Dedicated to the Council at The Hague.]How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughedAt sight of her boy Giants on the leapEach over other as they neighboured home,Fronting the day’s descent across green slopes,And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,It signalled some adventurous master-trickTo set Olympians buzzing in debate,Lest it might be their godhead undermined,The Tyranny menaced.  Ephialtes highOn shoulders of his brother Otos wavedFor the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roarWhile Otos aped the prisoner’s wrists and knees,With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;Till Gaea’s lap receiving them, they stretched,And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,Burst the hot story out of throats of both,Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glutThe hurried spout.  And as when drifting stormDisburdened loses clasp of here and yonA peak, a forest mound, a valley’s gleamOf grass and the river’s crooks and snaky coils,Signification marvellous she caught,Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at lastSubsided, and the serious naked deed,With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believeThat these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,These two made up of lion, bear and fox,Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,Still by the reckoning infants among men,Had done the deed to strike the Titan hostIn envy dumb, in envious heart elate:These two combining strength and craft had snared,Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly cagedThe blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;The barren furrower of anointed fields;The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:Great Ares.  And they gagged his trumpet mouthWhen they had seized on his implacable spear,Hugged him to reedy helplessness despiteHis godlike fury startled from amaze.For he had eyed them nearing him in play,The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,Unheeding his fell presence, by the mountOssa, beside a brushwood cavern; thereOn Earth’s original fisticuffs they calledFor ease of sharp dispute: whereat the God,Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,Good servitors of Ares they would be,And ply the pointed spear to dominateTheir rebel restless fellows, villain broodVowed to defy Immortals.  So it chancedAmusedly he watched them, and as oneThe lusty twain were on him and they had him.Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;A desolating fire to blind the sightWith splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,And tumbled down the cave.  But rather look—Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,And shatter earth’s delirious holiday,Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,Resolving to composure on its throbs.But see her in the Seasons through that year;That one glad year and the fair opening month.Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!War with her, gentle war with her, each dayHer sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strengthRenewed, indomitable; whereof they won,From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,Her ready secret: the abounding lifeReturned for valiant labour: she and theyDefeated and victorious turn by turn;By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.Exchange of powers of this conflict came;Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.Is battle nature’s mandate, here it reigned,As music unto the hand that smote the strings;And she the rosier from their showery brows,They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.Back to the primal rational of thoseWho suck the teats of milky earth, and claspStability in hatred of the insane,Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounceThe mortal mind’s concept of earth’s divorcedAbove; those beautiful, those masterful,Those lawless.  High they sit, and if descend,Descend to reap, not sowing.  Is it just?Earth in her happy children asked that word,Whereto within their breast was her reply.Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;Yet they (’twas the Great Mother’s voice inspiredThe audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,To meet the certain fate of earth’s divorced,And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruledThe Tyranny.  This her voice within them told,When softly the Great Mother chid her sonsNot of the giant brood, who did createThose lawless Gods, first offspring of our brainSet moving by an abject blood, that wakedTo wanton under elements more benign,And planted aliens on Olympian heights;—Imagination’s cradle poesyBecome a monstrous pressure upon men;—Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessedBy light from her, born of the love of her,Their lordship the illumined brain rejectsFor earth’s beneficent, the sons of Law,Her other name.  So spake she in their heart,Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneathYoung vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,Confidently to cling.  And when brown cornSwayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,With gold necks bent for any zephyr’s kiss;When vine-roots daily down a rubble soilDrank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,And yet a burning lion for the spring;Then in that time of general cherishment,Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,Then did good Gaea’s children gratefullyLift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,Delightful Peace, that answers Reason’s callHarmoniously and images her Law;Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,In memories made present on the brainBy natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;The picture of an earth allied to heaven;Between them the known smile behind black masks;Rightly their various moods interpreted;And frolic because toilful children borneWith larger comprehension of Earth’s aimAt loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.

THE NIGHT-WALK

Awakes for me and leaps from shroudAll radiantly the moon’s own nightOf folded showers in streamer cloud;Our shadows down the highway whiteOr deep in woodland woven-boughed,With yon and yon a stem alight.I see marauder runagatesAcross us shoot their dusky wink;I hear the parliament of chatsIn haws beside the river’s brink;And drops the vole off alder-banks,To push his arrow through the stream.These busy people had our thanksFor tickling sight and sound, but themeThey were not more than breath we drewDelighted with our world’s embrace:The moss-root smell where beeches grew,And watered grass in breezy space;The silken heights, of ghostly bloomAmong their folds, by distance draped.’Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,That cried to have its chaos shaped:Absorbing, little noting, stillEnriched, and thinking it bestowed;With wistful looks on each far hillFor something hidden, something owed.Unto his mantled sister, DayHad given the secret things we soughtAnd she was grave and saintly gay;At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;She flew on it, then folded wings,In meditation passing lone,To breathe around the secret things,Which have no word, and yet are known;Of thirst for them are known, as airIs health in blood: we gained enoughBy this to feel it honest fare;Impalpable, not barren, stuff.A pride of legs in motion keptOur spirits to their task meanwhile,And what was deepest dreaming slept:The posts that named the swallowed mile;Beside the straight canal the hutAbandoned; near the river’s sourceIts infant chirp; the shortest cut;The roadway missed; were our discourse;At times dear poets, whom some viewTranscendent or subdued evokedTo speak the memorable, the true,The luminous as a moon uncloaked;For proof that there, among earth’s dumb,A soul had passed and said our best.Or it might be we chimed on someHistoric favourite’s astral crest,With part to reverence in its gleam,And part to rivalry the shout:So royal, unuttered, is youth’s dreamOf power within to strike without.But most the silences were sweet,Like mothers’ breasts, to bid it feelIt lived in such divine conceitAs envies aught we stamp for real.To either then an untold taleWas Life, and author, hero, we.The chapters holding peaks to scale,Or depths to fathom, made our glee;For we were armed of inner fires,Unbled in us the ripe desires;And passion rolled a quiet sea,Whereon was Love the phantom sail.

THE HUELESS LOVE

Unto that love must we through fire attain,   Which those two held as breath of common air;   The hands of whom were given in bond elsewhere;Whom Honour was untroubled to restrain.Midway the road of our life’s term they met,   And one another knew without surprise;   Nor cared that beauty stood in mutual eyes;Nor at their tardy meeting nursed regret.To them it was revealed how they had found   The kindred nature and the needed mind;   The mate by long conspiracy designed;The flower to plant in sanctuary ground.Avowed in vigilant solicitude   For either, what most lived within each breast   They let be seen: yet every human testDemanding righteousness approved them good.She leaned on a strong arm, and little feared   Abandonment to help if heaved or sank   Her heart at intervals while Love looked blank,Life rosier were she but less revered.An arm that never shook did not obscure   Her woman’s intuition of the bliss—   Their tempter’s moment o’er the black abyss,Across the narrow plank—he could abjure.Then came a day that clipped for him the thread,   And their first touch of lips, as he lay cold,   Was all of earthly in their love untold,Beyond all earthly known to them who wed.So has there come the gust at South-west flung   By sudden volt on eves of freezing mist,   When sister snowflake sister snowdrop kissed,And one passed out, and one the bell-head hung.

SONG IN THE SONGLESS

They have no song, the sedges dry,      And still they sing.It is within my breast they sing,      As I pass by.Within my breast they touch a string,      They wake a sigh.There is but sound of sedges dry;In me they sing.

UNION IN DISSEVERANCE

Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;She that star overhead in slow descent:That white star with the front of angel she;He undone in his rays of glory spentHalo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,He casts round her, and knows his hour of restIncomplete, were the light for which he dies,Less like joy of the dove that wings to nest.Lustrous momently, near on earth she sinks;Life’s full throb over breathless and abased:Yet stand they, though impalpable the links,One, more one than the bridally embraced.

THE BURDEN OF STRENGTH

If that thou hast the gift of strength, then knowThy part is to uplift the trodden low;Else in a giant’s grasp until the endA hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.

THE MAIN REGRET

WRITTEN FOR THE CHARING CROSS ALBUMISeen, too clear and historic within us, our sins of omission   Frown when the Autumn days strike us all ruthlessly bare.They of our mortal diseases find never healing physician;   Errors they of the soul, past the one hope to repair.IISunshine might we have been unto seed under soil, or have scattered   Seed to ascendant suns brighter than any that shone.Even the limp-legged beggar a sick desperado has flattered   Back to a half-sloughed life cheered by the mere human tone.

ALTERNATION

Between the fountain and the rillI passed, and saw the mighty willTo leap at sky; the careless run,As earth would lead her little son.Beneath them throbs an urgent well,That here is play, and there is war.I know not which had most to tellOf whence we spring and what we are.

HAWARDEN

When comes the lighted day for men to readLife’s meaning, with the work before their handsTill this good gift of breath from debt is freed,Earth will not hear her children’s wailful bandsDeplore the chieftain fall’n in sob and dirge;Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.The sun that dropped down our horizon’s verge,Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,Now seen in sum, most glorious; and ’tis knownBy what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.A splendid image built of man has flown;His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.Ours the great privilege to have had oneAmong us who celestial tasks has done.

AT THE CLOSE

To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,Who straightway sound the call to arms.  Thou know’st;And that black spot in each embattled host,Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.Now is it red artillery and white steel;Till on a day will ring the victor’s boast,That ’tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.So in all times of man’s descent insaneTo brute, did strength and craft combining strike,Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.But at the close he entered Thy domain,Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-likeHe tore the fall’n, the Eternal was his Foe.

FOREST HISTORY

IBeneath the vans of doom did men pass in.   Heroic who came out; for round them hung   A wavering phantom’s red volcano tongue,With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:IIOld Earth’s original Dragon; there retired   To his last fastness; overthrown by few.   Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.Then man to play devorant straight was fired.IIIMore intimate became the forest fear   While pillared darkness hatched malicious life   At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knifeAnd wary slid the glance from ear to ear.IVIn chillness, like a clouded lantern-ray,   The forest’s heart of fog on mossed morass,   On purple pool and silky cotton-grass,Revealed where lured the swallower byway.VDead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound   Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.   It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spiteOf humble human being, held the ground.VIThrough friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow   The feet sustained by track of feet pursued   Pained steps, and found the common brotherhoodBy sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.VIIAnon a mason’s work amazed the sight,   And long-frocked men, called Brothers, there abode.   They pointed up, bowed head, and dug and sowed;Whereof was shelter, loaf, and warm firelight.VIIIWhat words they taught were nails to scratch the head.   Benignant works explained the chanting brood.   Their monastery lit black solitude,As one might think a star that heavenward led.IXUprose a fairer nest for weary feet,   Like some gold flower nightly inward curled,   Where gentle maidens fled a roaring world,Or played with it, and had their white retreat.XInto big books of metal clasps they pored.   They governed, even as men; they welcomed lays.   The treasures women are whose aim is praise,Was shown in them: the Garden half restored.XIA deluge billow scoured the land off seas,   With widened jaws, and slaughter was its foam.   For food, for clothing, ambush, refuge, home,The lesser savage offered bogs and trees.XIIWhence reverence round grey-haired story grew:   And inmost spots of ancient horror shone   As temples under beams of trials bygone;For in them sang brave times with God in view.XIIITill now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,   Like night’s first little stars through clearing showers.   Was rumoured how a castle’s falcon towersThe wilderness commanded with fierce mien.XIVTherein a serious Baron stuck his lance;   For minstrel songs a beauteous Dame would pout.   Gay knights and sombre, felon or devout,Pricked onward, bound for their unsung romance.XVIt might be that two errant lords across   The block of each came edged, and at sharp cry   They charged forthwith, the better man to try.One rode his way, one couched on quiet moss.XVIPerchance a lady sweet, whose lord lay slain,   The robbers into gruesome durance drew.   Swift should her hero come, like lightning’s blue!She prayed for him, as crackling drought for rain.XVIIAs we, that ere the worst her hero haps,   Of Angels guided, nigh that loathly den:   A toady cave beside an ague fen,Where long forlorn the lone dog whines and yaps.XVIIIBy daylight now the forest fear could read   Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.   Straight for the roebuck’s neck the bowman spentA dart that laughed at distance and at speed.XIXRight loud the bugle’s hallali elate   Rang forth of merry dingles round the tors;   And deftest hand was he from foreign wars,But soon he hailed the home-bred yeoman mate.XXBefore the blackbird pecked the turf they woke;   At dawn the deer’s wet nostrils blew their last.   To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast,With paying blows, the yokel strained his yoke.XXIThe city urchin mooned on forest air,   On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick   As swallows o’er smooth streams, and sighed him sickFor thinking that his dearer home was there.XXIIFamiliar, still unseized, the forest sprang   An old-world echo, like no mortal thing.   The hunter’s horn might wind a jocund ring,But held in ear it had a chilly clang.XXIIISome shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;   Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,   As though the leagues of woodland held them wrongedTo hear an axe and see a township climb.XXIVThe forest’s erewhile emperor at eve   Had voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.   At midnight a small people danced the dales,So thin that they might dwindle through a sieveXXVRinged mushrooms told of them, and in their throats,   Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.   The pensioned forester beside his crutch,Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.XXVICame then the one, all ear, all eye, all heart;   Devourer, and insensibly devoured;   In whom the city over forest flowered,The forest wreathed the city’s drama-mart.XXVIIThere found he in new form that Dragon old,   From tangled solitudes expelled; and taught   How blindly each its antidote besought;For either’s breath the needs of either told.XXVIIINow deep in woods, with song no sermon’s drone,   He showed what charm the human concourse works:   Amid the press of men, what virtue lurksWhere bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.XXIXOur conquest these: if haply we retain   The reverence that ne’er will overrun   Due boundaries of realms from Nature won,Nor let the poet’s awe in rapture wane.

A GARDEN IDYL

With sagest craft Arachne workedHer web, and at a corner lurked,Awaiting what should plump her soon,To case it in the death-cocoon.Sagaciously her home she choseFor visits that would never close;Inside my chalet-porch her feastPlucked all the winds but chill North-east.The finished structure, bar on bar,Had snatched from light to form a star,And struck on sight, when quick with dews,Like music of the very Muse.Great artists pass our single sense;We hear in seeing, strung to tense;Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,To think such beauty means a trap.But Nature’s genius, even man’sAt best, is practical in plans;Subservient to the needy thought,However rare the weapon wrought.As long as Nature holds it goodTo urge her creatures’ quest for foodWill beauty stamp the just intentOf weapons upon service bent.For beauty is a flower of rootsEmbedded lower than our boots;Out of the primal strata springs,And shows for crown of useful thingsArachne’s dream of prey to sizeAspired; so she could nigh despiseThe puny specks the breezes roundSupplied, and let them shake unwound;Assured of her fat fly to come;Perhaps a blue, the spider’s plum;Who takes the fatal odds in fight,And gives repast an appetite,By plunging, whizzing, till his wingsAre webbed, and in the lists he swings,A shrouded lump, for her to seeHer banquet in her victory.This matron of the unnumbered threads,One day of dandelions’ headsDistributing their gray perruquesUp every gust, I watched with looksDiscreet beside the chalet-door;And gracefully a light wind bore,Direct upon my webster’s wall,A monster in the form of ball;The mildest captive ever snared,That neither struggled nor despaired,On half the net invading hung,And plain as in her mother tongue,While low the weaver cursed her lures,Remarked, “You have me; I am yours.”Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,Her dream of size she saw, agape.Midway the vast round-raying beardA desiccated midge appeared;Whose body pricked the name of meal,Whose hair had growth in earth’s unreal;Provocative of dread and wrath,Contempt and horror, in one froth,Inextricable, insensible,His poison presence there would dwell,Declaring him her dream fulfilled,A catch to compliment the skilled;And she reduced to beaky skin,Disgraceful among kith and kinAgainst her corner, humped and aged,Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,Beyond disgust or hope in guile.Ridiculously volatileHe seemed to her last spark of mind;And that in pallid ash declinedBeneath the blow by knowledge dealt,Wherein throughout her frame she feltThat he, the light wind’s libertine,Without a scoff, without a grin,And mannered like the courtly few,Who merely danced when light winds blew,Impervious to beak and claws,Tradition’s ruinous Whitebeard was;Of whom, as actors in old scenes,Had grannam weavers warned their weans,With word, that less than feather-weight,He smote the web like bolt of Fate.This muted drama, hour by hour,I watched amid a world in flower,Ere yet Autumnal threads had laidTheir gray-blue o’er the grass’s blade,And still along the garden-runThe blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.Arachne crouched unmoved; perchanceHer visitor performed a dance;She puckered thinner; he the sameAs when on that light wind he came.Next day was told what deeds of nightWere done; the web had vanished quite;With it the strange opposing pair;And listless waved on vacant air,For her adieu to heart’s content,A solitary filament.

FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE

Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,Are they who point our pathway and sustain.They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.To see Life’s formless offspring and subdueDesire of times unripe, we have these two,Whose union is right reason: join they hands,The world shall know itself and where it stands;What cowering angel and what upright beastMake man, behold, nor count the low the least,Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.When these two meet, a point of time is ours.As in a land of waterfalls, that flowSmooth for the leap on their great voice below,Some eddies near the brink borne swift along,Will capture hearing with the liquid song,So, while the headlong world’s imperious forceResounded under, heard I these discourse.First words, where down my woodland walk she led,To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:—Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,When still I find you in this mire alone.—The few steps taken at a funeral paceBy men had slain me but for those you trace.—Look I once back, a broken pinion I:Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!—Needs must you drink of me while here you live,And make me rich in feeling I can give.—A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:Yet must I read my sister for the How.My daisy better knows her God of beamsThan doth an eagle that to mount him seems.She hath the secret never fieriest reachOf wing shall master till men hear her teach.—Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,My semblance when I have you not as now.The quiet creatures who escape mishapBear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:A picture of the settled peace desiredBy cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.I listen at their breasts: is there no jarOf wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,And such a picture as the piercing mindRanks beneath vegetation.  Not resignedAre my true pupils while the world is brute.What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,Stronger impels the motion of my heart.I am not Resignation’s counterpart.If that I teach, ’tis little the dry word,Content, but how to savour hope deferred.We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;Soon carrion if very earth are we!The coursing veins, the constant breath, the useOf sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,And pass despised; “a-cold for lack of heat,”Like other corpses, but without death’s plea.—My sister calls for battle; is it she?—Rather a world of pressing men in arms,Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charmsEach drowsy malady and coiling viceWith dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!No home is here for peace while evil breeds,While error governs, none; and must the seedsYou sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,Let stout contention drive deep furrows, bloodMoisten, and make new channels of its flood!—My sober little maid, when we meet first,Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.So can I not of her till circumstanceDrugs cravings.  Here we see how men advanceA doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,Like dead weeds on whipped waters.  Shout the wordPrompting their hungers, and they grandly march,As to band-music under Victory’s arch.Thus was it, and thus is it; save that thenThe beauty of frank animals had men.—Observe them, and down rearward for a term,Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.Thence look this way, across the fields that showMen’s early form of speech for Yes and No.My sister a bruised infant’s utterance had;And issuing stronger, to mankind ’twas mad.I knew my home where I had choice to feelThe toad beneath a harrow or a heel.—Speak of this Age.                        —When you it shall discernBright as you are, to me the Age will turn.—For neither of us has it any care;Its learning is through Science to despair.—Despair lies down and grovels, grapples notWith evil, casts the burden of its lot.This Age climbs earth.                              —To challenge heaven.                                                      —Not lessThe lower deeps.  It laughs at Happiness!That know I, though the echoes of it wail,For one step upward on the crags you scale.Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,Which means our soul asleep or body’s lust,Until from warmth of many breasts, that beatA temperate common music, sunlike heatThe happiness not predatory sheds!—But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads,Now rages to outdo a horny Past.Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vastAre thrown by every novel light upraised.The world’s whole round smokes ominously, amazedAnd trembling as its pregnant Ætna swells.Combustibles on hot combustiblesRun piling, for one spark to roll in fireThe mountain-torrent of infernal ireAnd leave the track of devils where men built.Perceptive of a doom, the sinner’s guiltConfesses in a cry for help shrill loud,If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:None save they but the souls which them contain.No extramural God, the God withinAlone gives aid to city charged with sin.A world that for the spur of fool and knave,Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save?But men who ply their wits in such a school,Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.—Much have I studied hard Necessity!To know her Wisdom’s mother, and that weMay deem the harshness of her later criesIn labour a sure goad to prick the wise,If men among the warnings which convulse,Can gravely dread without the craven’s pulse.Long ere the rising of this Age of ours,The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,And are as lasting as the parent thing.Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,They might o’ermatch and have mankind at will.Behold such army gathering: ours the spur,No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.Not fool or knave is now the enemyO’ershadowing men, ’tis Folly, Knavery!A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.Now must the brother soul alive in each,His traitorous individual devildomHold subject lest the grand destruction come.Dimly men see it menacing apaceTo overthrow, perchance uproot the race.Within, without, they are a field of tares:Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,And wherefore warrior service they must yield,Shines visible as life on either field.That is my comfort, following shock on shock,Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,The human and Satanic intellect,Determined for their uses to controlWhat forces on the earth and under roll,Their granite rock runs igneous; now they standPledged to the heavens for safety of their land.They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.—My sister, as I read them in my glass,Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.How waken them that have not any bentSave browsing—the concrete indifferent!Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:They fear not for the race when full the trough.They have much fear of giving up the ghost;And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.—If I could see with you, and did not faintIn beating wing, the future I would paint.Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:Now meanwhile is another mass awake,Once denser than the grunters of the sty.If I could see with you!  Could I but fly!—The length of days that you with them have housed,An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.—O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,While still they have a cause too piteous!Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,And quicken in the virtue of their cause,To think me a poor mouther of old saws!I wait the issue of a battling Age;The toilers with your “troughsters” now engage;Instructing them through their acutest sense,How close the dangers of indifference!Already have my people shown their worth,More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.That love to love of labour leads: thence loveOf humankind—earth’s incense flung above.—Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swellsOn Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;And if I bid it face what I observe,Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!—Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:As little as Time’s earliest knew the sky.Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flameAt intervals, in proof of whom they came.To strengthen our foundations is the taskOf this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,Though, lighted by your beams, down mining cavesThe rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.My sister sees no round beyond her mood;To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,It moves: O much for me to say it moves!About his Æthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,Though not the stream of the paternal smile:And where his tide of nourishment he drives,An Abyssinian wantonness revives.Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,He is the vast Insensate who devoursHis golden promise over leagues of seed,Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.The races which on barbarous force begin,Inherit onward of their origin,And cancelled blessings will the current lengthReveal till they know need of shaping strength.’Tis not in men to recognize the needBefore they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,For tens up the safe mountains at his head.Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.—That rings of truth!  More do your people thrive;Your Many are more merrily aliveThan erewhile when I gloried in the pageOf radiant singer and anointed sage.Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!All structures built upon a narrow spaceMust fall, from having not your hosts for base.O thrice must one be you, to see them shiftAlong their desert flats, here dash, there drift;With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!And thrice must one be you, to wait releaseFrom duress in the swamp of their increase.At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed,Philosophers behold; desponding view.Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,Dive down the fumy Ætna of their brains.Belated vessels on a rising sea,They seem: they pass!                                 —But not Philosophy!—Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despiseNought but the coward in us!  That way liesThe wisdom making passage through our slough.Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.Philosophy is Life’s one match for Fate.That photosphere of our high fountain One,Our spirit’s Lord and Reason’s fostering sun,Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!Advantage to the Many: that we nameGod’s voice; have there the surety in our aim.This thought unto my sister do I owe,And irony and satire off me throw.They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.Who never yet of scattered lamps was bornTo speed a world, a marching world to warn,But sunward from the vivid Many springs,Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.