 | Poems by Sarah Helen Whitman |  |
190
“SCIENCE.”
“The words ‘vital force,’ ‘instinct,’ ‘soul,’ are only expressions of our ignorance.”—
Buchner.While the dull Fates sit nodding at their loom,
Benumbed and drowsy with its ceaseless boom,
I hear, as in a dream, the monody
Of life's tumultuous, ever-ebbing sea;
The iron tramp of armies hurrying by
Forever and forever but to die;
The tragedies of time, the dreary years,
The frantic carnival of hopes and fears,
The wild waltz-music wailing through the gloom,
The slow death-agonies, the yawning tomb,
The loved ones lost forever to our sight,
In the wide waste of chaos and old night;
Earth's long, long dream of martyrdom and pain;
No God in heaven to rend the welded chain
Of endless evolution!
191
And mole-eyed “Science,” gloating over bones,
The skulls of monkeys and the Age of Stones,
Blinks at the golden lamps that light the hall
Of dusty death, and answers: “It is all.”
1877.
| Poems by Sarah Helen Whitman | |