SELVES

My dust in ruined Babylon
Is blown along the level plain,
And songs of mine at dawn have soared
Above the blue Sicilian main.

We are ourselves, and not ourselves ...
For ever thwarting pride and will
Some forebear’s passion leaps from death
To claim a vital license still.

Ancestral lusts that slew and died,
Resurgent, swell each living vein;
Old doubts and faiths, new panoplied,
Dispute the mastery of the brain.

The love of liberty that flames
From written rune and stricken reed
Shook the hot hearts of swordsmen sires
At Marathon and Runnymede.

What are these things we call our “selves”? ...
Have I not shouted, sobbed, and died
In the bright surf of spears that broke
Where Greece rolled back the Persian tide?

Are we who breathe more quick than they
Whose bones are dust within the tomb?
Nay, as I write, what gray old ghosts
Murmur and mock me from the gloom....

They call ... across strange seas they call,
Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time....
They startle me with wordless songs
To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme.

Our hearts swell big with dead men’s hates,
Our eyes sting hot with dead men’s tears;
We are ourselves, but not ourselves,
Born heirs, but serfs, to all the years!

I rode with Nimrod ... strove at Troy ...
A slave I stood in Crowning Tyre,
A queen looked on me and I loved
And died to compass my desire.

THE WAGES

EARTH loves to gibber o’er her dross,
Her golden souls, to waste;
The cup she fills for her god-men
Is a bitter cup to taste.

Who sees the gyves that bind mankind
And strives to strike them off
Shall gain the hissing hate of fools,
Thorns, and the ingrate’s scoff.

Who storms the moss-grown walls of eld
And beats some falsehood down
Shall pass the pallid gates of death
Sans laurel, love or crown;

For him who fain would teach the world
The world holds hate in fee
For Socrates, the hemlock cup;
For Christ, Gethsemane.

IN MARS, WHAT AVATAR?

“In Vishnu-land, what avatar?”
BROWNING.

PERCHANCE the dying gods of Earth
Are destined to another birth,
And worn-out creeds regain their worth
In the kindly air of other stars
What lords of life and light hold sway
In the myriad worlds of the Milky Way?
What avatars in Mars?

What Aphrodites from the seas
That lap the plunging Pleiades
Arise to spread afar
The dream that was the soul of Greece?
In Mars, what avatar?

Which hundred moons are wan with love
For dull Endymions?
Which hundred moons hang tranced above
Audacious Ajalons?

What Holy Grail lures errants pale
Through the wastes of yonder star?
What fables sway the Milky Way?
In Mars, what avatar?

When morning skims with crimson wings
Across the mères of Mercury,
What dreaming Memnon wakes and sings
Of miracles on Mercury?
What Christs, what avatars,
Claim Mars?

THE GOD-MAKER, MAN

NEVERMORE
Shall the shepherds of Arcady follow
Pan’s moods as he lolls by the shore
Of the mere, or lies hid in the hollow;
Nevermore
Shall they start at the sound of his reed-fashioned
flute;

Fallen mute
Are the strings of Apollo,
His lyre and his lute;
And the lips of the Memnons are mute
Evermore;
And the gods of the North, are they dead or
forgetful,
Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?
Are they drunk, or grown weary of worship and
fretful,
Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?

And into what night have the Orient dieties
strayed?
Swart gods of the Nile, in dusk splendors arrayed,
Brooding Isis and somber Osiris,
You were gone ere the fragile papyrus,
(That bragged you eternal!) decayed.

The avatars
But illumine their limited evens
And vanish like plunging stars;
They are fixed in the whirling heavens
No firmer than falling stars;
Brief lords of the changing soul, they pass
Like a breath from the face of a glass,
Or a blossom of summer blown shallop-like over
The clover
And tossed tides of grass.

Sink to silence the psalms and the pæans
The shibboleths shift, and the faiths,
And the temples that challenged the aeons
Are tenanted only by wraiths;
Swoon to silence the cymbals and psalters,
The worships grow senseless and strange,

And the mockers ask, "Where be thy altars?"
Crying, "Nothing is changeless but Change!"

Yes, nothing seems changeless, but Change.
And yet, through the creed-wrecking years,
One story for ever appears;
The tale of a City Supernal
The whisper of Something eternal
A passion, a hope, and a vision
That peoples the silence with Powers;
A fable of meadows Elysian
Where Time enters not with his Hours;
Manifold are the tale’s variations,
Race and clime ever tinting the dreams,
Yet its essence, through endless mutations,
Immutable gleams.

Deathless, though godheads be dying,
Surviving the creeds that expire,
Illogical, reason-defying,
Lives that passionate, primal desire;
Insistent, persistent, forever
Man cries to the silences, Never

Shall Death reign the lord of the soul,
Shall the dust be the ultimate goal
I will storm the black bastions of Night!
I will tread where my vision has trod,
I will set in the darkness a light,
In the vastness, a god!"

As the forehead of Man grows broader, so do
his creeds;
And his gods they are shaped in his image, and
mirror his needs;
And he clothes them with thunders and beauty,
he clothes them with music and fire;
Seeing not, as he bows by their altars, that he
worships his own desire;
And mixed with his trust there is terror, and
mixed with his madness is ruth,
And every man grovels in error, yet every man
glimpses a truth.

For all of the creeds are false, and all of the creeds
are true;
And low at the shrines where my brothers bow,
there will I bow, too;

For no form of a god, and no fashion
Man has made in his desperate passion
But is worthy some worship of mine;
Not too hot with a gross belief,
Nor yet too cold with pride,
I will bow me down where my brothers bow,
Humble but open-eyed!

UNREST

A FIERCE unrest seethes at the core
Of all existing things:
It was the eager wish to soar
That gave the gods their wings.

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 clans 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!

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

THE steam, the reek, the fume, of prayer
Blown outward for a million years,
Becomes a mist between the spheres,
And waking Sentience struggles there.

Prayer still creates the boon we pray;
And gods we’ve hoped for, from those hopes
Will gain sufficient form one day
And in full godhood storm the slopes
Where ancient Chaos, stark and gray,
Already trembles for his sway.

When that the restless worlds would fly
Their wish created rapid wings,
But not till aeons had passed by
With dower of many idler things;
And when dumb flesh demanded speech
Speech struggled to the lips at last;
Now the unpeopled Void, and vast,

Clean to that uttermost blank beach
Whereto the boldest thought may reach
That voyages from the vaguest past
(Dim realm and ultimate of space)
Is vexed and troubled, stirs and shakes,
In prescience of a god that wakes,
Born of man’s wish to see God’s face!

The endless, groping, dumb desires,
The climbing incense thick and sweet,
The lovely purpose that aspires,
The wraiths of vapor wing’d and fleet
That rise and run with eager feet
Forth from a myriad altar fires:
All these become a mist that fills
The vales and chasms nebular;
A shaping Soul that moves and thrills
The wastes between red star and star!

A SONG OF MEN

OUT of the soil and the slime,
Reeking, they climb,

Out of the muck and the mire,
Rank, they aspire;

Filthy with murder and mud,
Black with shed blood,

Lust and passion and clay
Dying, they slay;

Stirred by vague hints of a goal,
Seeking a soul!

Groping through terror and night
Up to the light:

Life in the dust and the clod
Sensing a God;

Flushed of the glamor and gleam
Caught from a dream;

Stained of the struggle and toil,
Stained of the soil,

Ally of God in the end
Helper and friend

Hero and prophet and priest
Out of the beast!

THE NOBLER LESSON

CHRIST was of virgin birth, and, being slain,
The creedists say, He rose from death again.
Oh, futile age-long talk of death and birth!
His life, that is the one thing wonder-worth;
Not how He came, but how He lived on earth.
For if gods stoop, and with quaint jugglery
Mock natures laws, how shall that profit thee?
The nobler lesson is that mortals can
Grow godlike through this baffled front of man!

AT LAST

EACH race has died and lived and fought for the
“true” gods of that poor race,
Unconsciously, divinest thought of each race
gilding its god’s face.
And every race that lives and dies shall make itself
some other gods,
Shall build, with mingled truth and lies, new icons
from the world-old clods.
Through all the tangled creeds and dreams and
shifting shibboleths men hold
The false-and-true, inwoven, gleams: a matted
mass of dross and gold.
Prove, then, thy gods in thine own soul; all others’
gods, for thee, are vain;
Nor swerved be, struggling for the goal, by bribe
of joy nor threat of pain.

As skulls grow broader, so do faiths; as old tongues
die, old gods die, too,

And only ghosts of gods and wraiths may meet
the backward-gazer’s view.
Where, where the faiths of yesterday? Ah,
whither vanished, whither gone?
Say, what Apollos drive to-day adown the flaming
slopes of dawn?
Oh, does the blank past hide from view forgotten
Christs, to be reborn,
The future tremble where some new Messiah-Memnon
sings the morn?
Of all the worlds, say any earth, like dust
wind-harried to and fro,
Shall give the next Prometheus birth; but say at
last you do not know.

How should I know what dawn may gleam beyond
the gates of darkness there?
Which god of all the gods men dream? Why
should I whip myself to care?
Whichever over all hath place hath shaped and
made me what I am;
Hath made me strong to front his face, to dare
to question though he damn.

Perhaps to cringe and cower and bring a shrine
a forced and faithless faith
Is far more futile than to fling your laughter in
the face of Death.
For writhe or whirl in dervish rout, they are not
flattered there on high,
Or sham belief to hide a doubt no gods are mine
that love a lie!
Nor gods that beg belief on earth with portents
that some seer foretells
Is life itself not wonder-worth that we must cry
for miracles?
Is it not strange enough we breathe? Does every-
thing not God reveal?
Or must we ever weave and wreathe some creed
that shall his face conceal?
Some creed of which its prophets cry it holds
the secret’s all-in-all:
Some creed which ever bye and bye doth crumble,
totter, to its fall!
Say any dream of all the dreams that drift and
darkle, glint and glow,
Holds most of truth within its gleams; but say
at last you do not know.

Oh, say the soul, from star to star, with victory
wing’d, leap on through space
And scale the bastioned nights that bar the secret’s
inner dwelling-place;
Or say it ever roam dim glades where pallid
wraiths of long-dead moons
Flit like blown feathers through the shades, borne
on the breath of sobbing tunes:
Say any tide of any time, of all the tides that ebb
and flow,
Shall buoy us on toward any clime; but say at
last you do not know!