 | As it Was in The Beginning |  |
CANTO I.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
“And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
“And God said, let there be light: and there was light.”
I
They sat the sundown bank beside,Beyond the rock-locked Gate of Gold
Nine people in ten, even in California where you find the widest traveled and best read people under the path of the sun, will tell you that the Golden Gate owes its name to the ingress and egress of the Argonauts.
The facts are the Bay of San Francisco was discovered and named by a party of priests making a journey of discovery from San Diego to the north.
And the Golden Gate was named and surveyed by a party of sun-bronzed overland explorers with the dust of three thousand miles' travel on their leathern habiliments, years before the discovery of gold.
John C. Fremont, in his book, “Memoirs of My Life,” writes: “To this gate I gave the name of Chrysopylæ or Golden Gate, for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium (Constantinople) was named the Golden Horn (Chrysoceras).”
So like that Golden Horn of old
When Sappho sang and Phaon plied
And silent watched the waning sun.
Ten thousand miles of mobile sea—
This sea of all seas blent as one
Wide, unbound book of mystery,
Of awe, of sibyl prophecy,
Ere yet a ghost or misty ken
Of God's far first beginning when
Vast darkness lay upon the deep,
And when God's spirit moved upon
Such waters cradled in such sleep—
Such night as never yet knew dawn,
Such night as wierd atallaph weaves
But never mortal man conceives.
II
He said—his face was leaned to hers,As warmest of all worshippers:—
“In the beginning? Where and when,
Before the fashioning of men
Swung first His high lamp to and fro,
To light us as we please to go?
And where the waters, dark deeps when
God spake and said, ‘Let there be light’?”
Dark curtained with majestic night—
Dusk Silence in travail of light
That knew not man or man's, at all—
Black battle-ship or steel-built wall.
III
“Aye, these, these were the waters whenGod spake and knew His white first-born,
That far, first, new-born baby morn,
Such eons ere the noise of men.
Yon Southern Cross, high-built about
The deep, set in a town of stars,
Commemorates, forbids a doubt
That here first fell God's golden bars—
Red bars, with soft, white silver blent,
Broad sown from sapphire firmament.
IV
“Behold what wave-lights leap and runSwift up the shale from out the sea!
Inwove with silver, golden sun
Light lingers in the tawny mane
Of wild oats waving lazily
Far up the climbing poppy plain,
The California poppy, now the State Flower by act of the Legislature, was called The Cup of Gold or Holy Grail by the priests and Spanish explorers. Long years later, after the discovery of Alaska and her gold fields by a Danish navigator, Vitus Bering in the service of Russia (1745–9), a Russian Prince of culture, took the seed from Fort Ross, California, where Russia was then trying to get a foot-hold in order to grow cereals for her gold miners in Alaska and first exploited our poppy in the gardens of his Imperial master at Saint Petersburg. Hence the flower in botany now bears his name. It is a generous and prolific plant, and nearly a quarter of a century ago I was delighted to find it already getting a foothold on the hillsides and along the mountain byways of Italy and Southern France.
Mrs. Fremont says “The golden poppy is a poetical expression from Mother Earth in California, of the gold hidden in her bosom.”
The golden poppy is God's gold,The gold that lifts, nor weighs us down,
The gold that knows no miser's hold,
The gold that banks not in the town,
But singing, laughing, freely spills
Its hoard far up the happy hills;
Far up, far down, at every turn,—
What beggar has not gold to burn!
Far up yon steeps of dusk and dawn—
Black night, white light, inwound as one.
But when, when fell that far, first dawn
With ways of gold to walk upon?
V
“I know not when, but only knowThat darkness lay upon yon deep,
Lay cradled, as a child asleep,
And that God's spirit moved upon
These waters ere the burst of dawn
When first His high lamps to and fro
Shone forth to guide which way to go.
VI
“I only know that Silence keepsHigh court forever still hereon,
That Silence lords alone these deeps,
The silence of God's house and keeps
Inviolate yon water's face,
As if still His abiding place,
As ere that far, first burst of dawn
Ere fretful man set sail upon.
VII
“The deeps,” he mused, “are still as whenDusk Silence kept her curtained bed
Low moaning for the birth of dawn,
When she should push that night aside,
As some dread nightmare most abhorred—
When she might laughing look upon
God's first-born glory, holy Light,
As when fond Eve, exulting cried,
In mother-pain, with mother-pride,
‘Behold the fair first-born of men,
Behold a man-child of the Lord!
I gat a man-child of the Lord!’”
VIII
“Aye, Silence seems some maid at prayer,God's arm about her when she prays
And where she prays and everywhere,
Or storm-strewn days or sundown days—
What ill to Silence can befall
Since Silence knows no ill at all?
IX
“Vast Silence seems some twilight skyThat leans as with her weight of stars
To rest, to rest, no more to roam,
But rest and rest eternally.
She loosens and lets down the bars,
She brings the kind-eyed cattle home,
She breathes the fragrant field of hay
And heaven is not far away.
X
“The deeps of soul are still the deepsWhere stately silence ever keeps
High court with calm Nirvana, where
No shallows break the noisy shore
Or beat, with sad, incessant roar,
The fettered, fevered world of care
As noisesome vultures fret the air.
XI
“The star-sown seas of thought are still,As when God's plowmen scatter corn
Along the mellow grooves at morn,
In patient trust to wait His will.
The star-sown seas of thought are wide
But voiceless, noiseless, deep as night:
Disturb not these, the silent seas
Are sacred unto souls allied
As golden poppies unto bees.
Here, from the first, rude giants wrought,
Here delved, here scattered stars of thought
To grow, to bloom in years unborn,
As grows the gold-horned yellow corn.”
XII
As one beholding some sweet nookOf wild oats mantling yellow, pink,
So dewy new that never yet
E'en timid rabbit's foot has set,
Will pass, then turn, return to look,
Then pass again to think and think,
Then try to not turn back again,
But try and try to quite forget
And sighing, try and try in vain;
So you would turn and turn again
To her, her girlish woman's grace—
Full-flowered yet fair baby's face.
XIII
Her wide, sweet mouth, an opened rose,Pushed out, reached out, as if to kiss;
This moment, then unlike to this
As storm to calm, as day to night,
As sullen darkness to swift light,
This new-made woman was, this sun
And surged sea interwound in one.
XIV
Her proud and ample lips pushed outAs kissing sea-winds unaware;
And then they arched in angry pout,
As if she cared yet did not care,
Then lightning lit her great, wide eyes,
As if black thunder walled the skies,
And all things took some touch of her,
The while she stood nor deigned to stir:
XV
Such eyes as compass all the skies,That see all things yet naught have seen;
Such eyes of love and sorrow's eyes—
A martyr or a Magdalene.
How sad that all great souls are sad!
How sad that gladness is not glad—
That Love's sad sister is sweet Pain,
That only lips of beauty drain
Life's full-brimmed, glittering goblet dry,
And only drain the cup to die!
XVI
The yellow of her poppy hairWas as red gold is, when at rest;
But when aroused was as the west
In sunset flame and then—take care!
Her tall, free-fashioned, supple form
Was now some sudden, tropic storm,
Was now some lily leaned at play.
What sea and sun, sunshine and shower
Full-flowered ere the noon of day,
Full June ere yet the noon of May,
Precocious Californian flower!
XVII
She answered not but looked awayWith brown hand arched above her brow,
As peers a boatman from his prow,
To where white sea-doves wheeled at play.
She watched them long, then turned and sighed
And looking in his face she cried
While blushing prettily, “Behold,
There is no mateless dove, not one!
And see! not one unhappy dove.
Ten thousand circling in the sun,
Entangled as the mesh of fate,
Yet each remains as true as gold
And constant courts his pretty mate.
See here! See there! Below, above—
I think yon dove would die for love.”
XVIII
He watched the shallows spume the shoreThen far at sea his swift eyes swept
Where one tall, stately, snow-white sail
Its silent course majestic kept.
“The shallows murmur and complain,
The shallows turn with wind and tide,
They fringe with froth and moil the main;
They wail and will not be denied—
Poor, puny babes, unsatisfied!
XIX
“The light-house clings her beetling steepToward the rock-sown, ragged shore
Where Scylla and Charybdis roar
And dangers lurk and shallows keep
Mad tumult in the house of sleep.
The shallows moan and moan alway—
The deeps have not one word to say.
XX
“I reckon Silence as a graceThat was ere light had name or place;
A saint enshrined ere hand was laid
To fashioning of man or maid.
For, storm or calm, or sun or shade,
Fair Silence never truth betrayed;
For, ocean deep or dappled sky,
Loved Silence never told a lie.”
| As it Was in The Beginning | |