The Poetical Works of George Barlow In Ten [Eleven] Volumes |
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The Poetical Works of George Barlow | ||
FRUITLESS CREATION
I retain this poem, written in or about 1890, as the very fact of its being based on so glaring and serious a mistake may perhaps render it of some value,—when the mistake is recognised and acknowledged.
The mistake is, of course, that into which Tolstoy and so many earnest modern thinkers bave plunged headlong; the error of regarding physical love as in its essence degrading. It is the most dangerous error imaginable, leading straight back to all ascetic and monkish aberration, and involving the desecration of love and woman.
If the “Woman” who speaks in the poem had confined herself to the advocacy of pure and exalted physical passion, she would have been wholly right, and might justly have claimed the support of the God who created those miracles of noble and beneficent design, the human love-organs.
But, reacting against such pernicious heresies as those of Tolstoy, she confuses true with base passion, places herself in a seeming opposition to the God of love and nature, who is in fact so tenderly and lovingly on her side,—and thus puts herself wholly in the wrong.
It seems necessary to-day to say this much in explanation of the poem.
February, 1902. G. B.I. THE FIRST STAR
The bright prow flashed and gleamed.
Within his soul the great Shipwright debated:
He doubted, and he dreamed.
Its Builder's work is o'er.
Soft river-waves around the gold bows eddy;
It yearns to quit the shore.
Of the outer air and sea?
Can my star-ship withstand the fierce real ocean?
Will it steer back to me?
All measurement and bound,
Will it be lost? Will my star triumph, speeding
O'er depths no lead can sound?
To others, less than I?
Shall I send forth this star,—then watch it fleeing
Lone through the unkindred sky?
Safety for it, for me.
Shall I break up the lampless gloom's completeness,
Saying to the first star: ‘Be’?”
“If, when I make a sun,
I deepen night; if good deeds must be seasoned
With evil, every one;
And breathe forth peace and bliss,
With passionate force they search the woods' green alleys,
And ravish when they kiss;
Arrayed in furious white,
Bay round the bows of labouring ships that struggle
Through the stupendous night;
And full of purest bloom,
Man must attack the flower, and mar its splendour,
And plant lust in its room;
Whom I would grandly mould,
Must change into man's slave, on man dependent,
And sell her love for gold;
With life and space and time!
Within some creek I had best lay up my vessel,
Nor risk the voyage sublime.”
(With what result, we know.)
God signalled with his hand,—with voice unshaken
Said to the first star: “Go.”
II. THE LAST STAR
Into the facts of time.
Through age on age God watched, with gaze unslumbering,
Sorrow and sin and crime.
From his great throne in space
He watched maybe some city's blood-stained capture,
Or death-throes of a race.
He heard gaunt lions roar:
He heard the groans and curses of the dying;
He heard ships strike the shore.
He saw love change to shame:
He saw death sweep the stars with devastation;
He saw hell's leaping flame.
As old in turn they grew:
He saw disease waste millions of his creatures:
He saw the leper's hue.
He saw mad hatred rage:
He saw pure women strive, man's lusts deflower them,
From darkling age to age.
Love's messengers sublime.
Mad unbelief rose, armed to circumvent them:
Death conquered them, and time.
But him the people slew.
Man steeled his heart against Christ's tender pity,
And so man's sorrow grew.
So other Christs were born.
Their various fates in one point did not vary;
Each Christ was crowned with thorn.
Each other, all alike
Smote their own Christs with hands that did not tremble,
And lifted spears to strike.
Flashed on a world's dim way,
Its fellow-beings strove with hate inhuman
To quench the genius-ray.
Satan appeared as well.
God's hand, revealing heaven, disclosed below it
The yawning gulfs of hell.
The heavens in darkness deep
He wrapped. The voice that bade the first star waken
Said to the last star: “Sleep.”
III. THE SECOND PARADISE
A tenderer thought of pity came:
God would not leave the heavens quite void;
There still should burn one beacon-flame.
Fling light, though all stars else were dead.
For countless mighty suns a tomb!
For one small star new birth instead!
And for two human beings as well
More life to use, or fling away;
A grander heaven, or deeper hell.
The sole survivors these shall be:
For mine own purpose I will use
This rearguard of humanity.
Lords of its wastes of wood and plain:
The whole wide earth shall be their throne,
Their vast impregnable domain.
Shall testify of ancient hours.
No ghosts of dead cold stars shall shine,
Nor pale ghosts of forgotten flowers.
An Adam and an Eve shall be
Sole in the glory of their reign
O'er silent earth and sailless sea.
In these the recompence I sought
In vain, in vain, amid mankind,
Born of mine unripe earlier thought.
I sweep the whole race to their tomb.
Man staggered, woman wholly fell;
Tearless, I leave them to their doom.
These two shall carry out my plan;
Shall live, and grow beyond the grave
To perfect woman, perfect man.
On this one point the whole depends:
Let not love's image be defaced,
Disfigured, for ignoble ends.
From man to angel, but abstain
From quenching at wild passion's cup
A thirst whose quenching is not gain.
The whole primeval world indeed!
Now I would make all wholly new,
And gift man with a nobler creed.
To recreate the lower type
Upon this sorrowing earth again:
Your star for higher forms is ripe.”
IV. THE SECOND FALL
The Man.Lonely at last upon a lonely star.
The lot of those who peopled earth was grand,
But our dispeopling doom is grander far.
All earth's old passions vanish into air.
I see the dawning angel in thy face;
I mark heaven's halo brightening round thy hair.
Dismissing all that marred the race's powers,
Shall add new glory to an unknown sea,
Mix tenderer fragrance with the unborn flowers.
Of sin,—the fields took on a sombre hue:
Gladness forsook the green old festive earth;
The waves grew grey that once were joyous blue.
Love, guided well by woman's traitorous hand,
Has wrecked the stars—till this, the very last,
On which to-day with lonely feet we stand.
And lips that seem like pure half-opened flowers,
Hast forced the world's Creator to retreat:
The power to extinguish love at last is ours!
The Woman.
That's ours, to shed new splendour o'er the sea.
If love be sin, then very sweet is sinning:
Sin shall endure throughout eternity.
Luxuriant, on some bosom warm and white?
When God with Chaos' ebon darkness wrestled,
It was to give love never-ending light.
Has ever moon with lesser lustre gleamed,
Watching some lover in sweet first amazement
Kissing the lips of which for years he dreamed?
The passionate raptures of past years untold,
See in my eyes the love-looks of a nation,
A century's sunshine in my hair of gold?
That starlike lit old cities, hills, and plains,
Are all for thee,—on thee they wait attendant:
Lo! Cleopatra burns within my veins.
Strange bowers of love in many a far-off place:
For thee shall Fate with ardent touch concentre
All beauty in one incomparable face.
Of timeless generations yet to arise?
Adam begat one world—beget another!
Make fruitful all the dark womb of the skies!
Propel afresh the life-throbs of the race
Along the channels where life pauses, slumbering:
Behold new starlight, gazing on my face!
To crowd the lifeless heaven that o'er us gleams
With fleets of planets through the dark waves steering,
Lord of a kingdom mocking mortal dreams?
August and solemn, calls thee to decide.
Above us loom vast starless heavens and hateful:
Around us stretch lone lifeless fields and wide.
Within thy soul to me—Disperse the gloom!
The winds of winter look to thee for guiding:
Raise the dead summers from their darkling tomb.
Shall flash their spears once more against the sun:
Within new lovers' hearts shall wake the old yearning;
Win me! even so our daughters shall be won.
Shall fill the warm pure air with scent of may:
New autumns, full of soft and tremulous sadness,
Feel at love's touch that sadness melt away.
Lord of the summer, as of winter's snows:
Ruler and lord of all the dark sea's treasons;
Lord of the love that beckons from the rose.
Shalt share the passionate life that is to be:
Preside, it may be, at some new Troy's capture,
Hold the steep pass at some Thermopylæ.
New fiercer life than that which throbbed of old
Along the madding streets surge round thee and meet thee;
New sunsets tinge their skies with stormier gold.
Rise into light, flash high, then disappear,—
Calm joys succeed to stormy tribulations,
And golden springs to many a snow-clad year.
Through the broad portals of the years shall move:
But all shall sing of me,—of all their number
Thorn-crowned, sin-marred, not one shall fail to love.
But, as more skilled time's strong musicians grow,
Still must love render the wild strings ethereal;
I sway them, whether their hearts will or no.
Their heavenliest impulse from my form shall take.
Shall one curve pass from human memory? Never!
Dead marble shall be deathless for my sake.
Waited love's longed-for resurrection morn
Shall rise, and hear the sound of women weeping,
The passionate prayers of races yet unborn.
Shall raise bright palaces in many a land:
But ever love's shall be the heart designing,
And love's the shaping and adorning hand.
This sin superb, if sin indeed it be,
We shall for ever stamp our own impression
On stars and sun, and towns and hills and sea.
Thou shalt compel time's hand to recreate:
Thou shalt rewrite the legend, the fierce story,
Of hell,—reprint man's epic poem of hate.
Flash forth upon the world, blood-stained yet grand;
Ambassador for God, yet Satan's minister,
Climbing the stairs of heaven with dripping hand.
Proclaim his own flock saved, the heathen doomed.
At hell's Bastille again shall sweet love wonder,
And weep for thousands in its vaults entombed.
With thousand-throated laugh of mocking scorn
Roll back the gates barred by the hands infernal,
And flood night's dungeons with the sunlit morn.
Through ardent souls on many a future sea:
Again smoke-vomiting iron fleets commingle;—
Their guns await one signal-flash from thee!
Of sword-points at some far-off Waterloo
Against calm squares: thine is the intense emotion
Of combat, ever-fierce and ever-new.
Love's pleasure; young lips pause at lips most sweet,—
Apart, they wait thy mandate.—Wilt thou never
Speak the one radiant word that bids them meet?
The power to bid great countless stars arise
Upon the night wherethrough with heart unshaken
The maid who seeks her lover peers and flies.
Without thy will can one love-deed be done.
Thou canst blindfold the watchers,—thou for ever
Canst bring sweet darkness, and blindfold the sun.
Dreads lest love's foot i'the darkness go astray:
But thou canst light love's lamp of golden-amber,
The summer moon that shows love's foot the way.
Thou canst restore the sun's kiss to the wave.
Love, slain by Fate, will rise up, vast, immortal,
If thou wilt summon Love's form from the grave.
“Awake!”—to heaven say, “Let the darkness flee!”
Scatter the soul's deep darkness, turning meward:
Lift up thine eyes, thy princely face, on me.
On whom the eyes of the ages shall be bent,—
Wilt thou, my slave, be to all else dictator,—
Wilt thou consent to love me?
The Man.
The Poetical Works of George Barlow | ||