Part 13

From what flat wastes of cosmic slime, And stung by what quick fire, Sunward the restless races climb!-- Men risen out of mire!

There throbs through all the worlds that are This heart-beat hot and strong, And shaken systems, star by star, Awake and glow in song.

But for the urge of this unrest These joyous spheres were mute; But for the rebel in his breast Had man remained a brute.

When baffled lips demanded speech, Speech trembled into birth-- (One day the lyric word shall reach From earth to laughing earth)--

When man's dim eyes demanded light The light he sought was born-- His wish, a Titan, scaled the height And flung him back the morn!

From deed to dream, from dream to deed, From daring hope to hope, The restless wish, the instant need, Still lashed him up the slope!

. . . . . .

I sing no governed firmament, Cold, ordered, regular-- I sing the stinging discontent That leaps from star to star!

THE PILTDOWN SKULL

WHAT was his life, back yonder In the dusk where time began, This beast uncouth with the jaw of an ape And the eye and brain of a man?-- Work, and the wooing of woman, Fight, and the lust of fight, Play, and the blind beginnings Of an Art that groped for light?--

In the wonder of redder mornings, By the beauty of brighter seas, Did he stand, the world's first thinker, Scorning his clan's decrees?-- Seeking, with baffled eyes, In the dumb, inscrutable skies, A name for the greater glory That only the dreamer sees?

One day, when the afterglows, Like quick and sentient things,

With a rush of their vast, wild wings, Rose out of the shaken ocean As great birds rise from the sod, Did the shock of their sudden splendor Stir him and startle and thrill him, Grip him and shake him and fill him With a sense as of heights untrod?-- Did he tremble with hope and vision, And grasp at a hint of God?

London stands where the mammoth Caked shag flanks with slime-- And what are our lives that inherit The treasures of all time? Work, and the wooing of woman, Fight, and the lust of fight, A little play (and too much toil!) With an Art that gropes for light; And now and then a dreamer, Rapt, from his lonely sod Looks up and is thrilled and startled With a fleeting sense of God!

THE SEEKER

THE creeds he wrought of dream and thought Fall from him at the touch of life, His old gods fail him in the strife-- Withdrawn, the heavens he sought!

Vanished, the miracles that led, The cloud at noon, the flame at night; The vision that he wing'd and sped Falls backward, baffled, from the height;

Yet in the wreck of these he stands Upheld by something grim and strong; Some stubborn instinct lifts a song And nerves him, heart and hands:

He does not dare to call it hope;-- It is not aught that seeks reward--

Nor faith, that up some sunward slope Runs aureoled to meet its lord;

It touches something elder far Than faith or creed or thought in man, It was ere yet these lived and ran Like light from star to star;

It touches that stark, primal need That from unpeopled voids and vast Fashioned the first crude, childish creed,-- And still shall fashion, till the last!

For one word is the tale of men: They fling their icons to the sod, And having trampled down a god They seek a god again!

Stripped of his creeds inherited, Bereft of all his sires held true, Amid the wreck of visions dead He thrills at touch of visions new....

He wings another Dream for flight.... He seeks beyond the outmost dawn A god he set there ... and, anon, Drags that god from the height!

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But aye from ruined faiths and old That droop and die, fall bruised seeds; And when new flowers and faiths unfold They're lovelier flowers, they're kindlier creeds.

THE AWAKENING