A Reading Of Life, Other Poems Part 7

--Not less The 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 l.u.s.t, Until from warmth of many b.r.e.a.s.t.s, that beat A temperate common music, sunlike heat The happiness not predatory sheds!

--But your fierce Yes and No of b.u.t.ting heads, Now rages to outdo a h.o.r.n.y Past.

Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast Are thrown by every novel light upraised.

The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed And trembling as its pregnant AEtna swells.

Combustibles on hot combustibles Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire The mountain-torrent of infernal ire And leave the track of devils where men built.

Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud, If drops the chillness of a pa.s.sing cloud, To conscience, reason, human love; in vain: None save they but the souls which them contain.

No extramural G.o.d, the G.o.d within Alone 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 we May deem the harshness of her later cries In labour a sure goad to p.r.i.c.k 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 l.u.s.ts and la.s.situdes 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 enemy O'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 devildom Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.

Dimly men see it menacing apace To 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 control What forces on the earth and under roll, Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand Pledged 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 gla.s.s, Their field of tares they take for pasture gra.s.s.

How waken them that have not any bent Save 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 faint In beating wing, the future I would paint.

Those ma.s.sed indifferents will learn to quake: Now meanwhile is another ma.s.s 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 love Of humankind--earth's incense flung above.

--Admit some other features: Faithless, mean; Encased in matter; vowed to G.o.ds obscene; Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On 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 c.o.c.katrices 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 l.u.s.trous flame At intervals, in proof of whom they came.

To strengthen our foundations is the task Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask, Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves The rock it blasts, the h.o.a.rded 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 AEthiop 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 devours His 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 length Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.

'Tis not in men to recognize the need Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.

Then may sharp suffering their nature grind; Of rabble pa.s.sions 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 alive Than erewhile when I gloried in the page Of 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 s.p.a.ce Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.

O thrice must one be you, to see them shift Along 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 release From 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 AEtna of their brains.

Belated vessels on a rising sea, They seem: they pa.s.s!

--But not Philosophy!

--Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise Nought but the coward in us! That way lies The wisdom making pa.s.sage 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 name G.o.d'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 born To speed a world, a marching world to warn, But sunward from the vivid Many springs, Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.

FRAGMENTS OF THE ILIAD IN ENGLISH HEXAMETER VERSE

THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES

ILIAD, B. I. V. 149

"HEIGH me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one, Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians, Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?

I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armed Trojans, Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done; Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen; Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvests Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.