A pageant of poets and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Are we but blended types, rebred
From the battalions of the Dead,
Back to the days of low degrees
When bald apes, swinging in the trees,
Bandied sharp jibes across the boughs,
As, erst, men in Saint Stephen's House;—
Gabbled in chattering sapience
From the drear ridge of empty brows,
And gave applause and took offence
Mid blindfold play of wit and sense?

Back through the years of flint and bone,
Ere ever loaded bomb was thrown,
When, faithful to his tribal law,
The amorous savage trapped his squaw
And haled her, out of feigned attack,
Far down some lonely forest track,
Where later, flying at his throat,
For all she bore she paid him back,
And burned his hovel or his boat
For screeds less sacred than the Vote.

Back to the days when Gods were thick
As blossoms in the budded quick,
Since each took idols as he chose,
And, unpropitious, gave them blows,
Or burned rare spice about their knees
And wrought them gilded Sanctuaries.
Therefore in no more subtle way,
Their help to gain or wrath appease
And heedless of their feet of clay,
We supplicate our Gods to-day.

Happy the man whose life accords
Least with his ante-natal lords:
Who, in the runnels of his veins,
No secret-seething tide constrains,
Tumultuous with the bursting spores
Of sins that slew his ancestors;
Nor in some strait of desperate dole,
A slave to what his mind abhors,
Down the blind spade-ways of the mole
Senses the tyrants of his soul.

For half a lifetime, chaste and prim,
We rally to the Vesper Hymn,
The cushioned pew, the bread and wine,
The Saints that from the windows shine,
Yet nursing sparks of smouldering ire
That ravined in a Berserk sire:
Then, in some tissue's secret cell,
The breeding plague-spot bursts afire,—
Leaps out, a rage untamable,
And drags us to the gulfs of Hell.

Lusts that men knew and wearied of
Earlier than Rameses and Thoth,
Resurging in a riotous brain
Their grip upon the world maintain.

Red are the roses as of yore
That sway, festooned, by many a door
And shrouding jalousie discreet:
The fruit yet riper than before;
As multitudinous the feet
That enter the forbidden street.

From the chance-medleys of the womb
Now burgeons what malignant bloom?—
The fierce, destructive Communist,
With bomb, and dagger at his wrist;—
His stealthier sister-petroleuse,
Adept alike with can and fuse,
A poison gas, corroding lime,
Slipped from the sky, like falling dews,—
Building in tragic Pantomime
New Babels on the shoals of Time:—

Far kindred to that Lemnian band
Who killed their men-folk out of hand;
Or them who rent their children's limbs
To the mad throb of Bacchic hymns;
Or later, raised the Rataplan
In Paris, for the Rights of Man;
The Guillotine's dulled blades reset:—
Screaming beside the tumbrils ran,
And, from Saint Antoine's shambles wet,
Shore the crowned curls of Antoinette.

Nay, rather, may not I and you
Unending destinies pursue,
From life to life still onward tossed,
In the vast maze of Being lost;—
Our exits darkened paths between
That double back into the scene
Whereof the earlier memory dies

Like lantern pictures from the screen,
Greeting with unrecalling eyes
Old aspects of the older skies?

Behold the World—an endless Fair,
With clamorous drums and lights aflare
Round booths that teem with monstrous shows
And Stages where the drama flows
Eddying from Farce to Tragedy,
While restless crowds sway surging by
Shouting or dumb but unconcerned.—
A sudden flicker in the sky—
A flamelet from a lamp o'erturned—
A mob wiped out, a city burned!

And all the while across the way,
Fresh clowns buffoon, more Antics play.
But trampled on the eternal round
The puppets from the dust rebound,
Ten thousand times destroyed, renewed,
Or ravished out of desuetude,
Changing in semblance, speech, and name,
The part assigned, the dream pursued,
Yet in their essences the same
Unto the Masters of the Game.