University of Virginia Library

1. VOLUME I

THE SONG OF THE WAVE AND OTHER POEMS
POEMS (1899–1902)
CAIN

THE SONG OF THE WAVE AND OTHER POEMS

EXORDIUM

A FIRST WORD

THE OCEAN SINGS

THE SONG OF THE WAVE

THE EAST WIND

THE NORSEMEN

“WAS HAT MAN DIR, DU ARMES KIND, GETHAN?”

Weep nevermore again!
The wind's wild footstep thrills the leaves with pain;
Then desert silence, then the scattered cries
Of frail-voiced children, then within thy heart
A sense of falling leaves through gray linked rain,
Of perished youth with grave prophetic eyes
And strange scant visions of a hopeless past;
A sense of life no older than thou art,
And in thy soul, of bright tears falling fast—
Hush! tired child, weep nevermore again.

THE SONG OF THE SWORD

PRELUDE

INVOCATION

THE SONG

AFTER-WORD

BALLAD

DAWN

SUNSET

The sea a great vague mistiness of blue,
A thread of murmur drawn about the shore,
The journeying of wind across the moor
Even and slow and delicate with dew.
The peace of ancient sorrow come anew,
The resignation of a great despair
And failing of all struggle into prayer;—
The promise of a day is proved untrue.
The choired sweetness of home-gathered birds,
The tall gaunt shadows and the mellow light,
The tirèd leaves that fold against the tree;
Within the heart unutterable words,
The pure compassion of the toward night—
A day that dies and never more shall be.

THE GATES OF LIFE

MOTHERS OF MEN

LOVE IN AGE

A MEMORY

AGE

EVENING

TO A WOMAN

THE END

NEANT

YOUTH

SERENADE

SONG

SONG

[Silent, alone! Around the wrinkled earth]

THEY

TO A BUST OF THE MATER DOLOROSA

TO PSYCHE

THE WILL

TUCKANUCK

PASTORAL

Slopes of the sun and vine, and thou dark stream,
Thou minstrel of the forest-gloom, whose roll
Is like the passing of a natural dream
Through depths of patient sleep
To lend endurance to the taxèd soul.
The cruel life beneath the cruel noon,
Where men are quenched like dewdrops in the sun,
Where haggard women reach to God and weep,
Never corrodes thy silent solitude;
But where thy sheer, green shadows shoreward creep
Through the slow afternoon,
The battle lost, the poem half-begun,
Are chaplets that the hymning dawn-stars keep
To grace the splendid hope our youth imbued.
The twilight flowers close
And down the shadow falls a timid star; Afar
The sigh and silence of a changing wind,
The perfume of a dying rose—
Beyond the senses and beyond the mind
Dimly we hear a graver music grow,—
Peace! Peace! the world is tuneful of her woes:
With man's despair the richer chord impearled
Is infinite of grief; we in the world
Hear scattered discord, nor the broad full flow
Of song until, waxed greater than the whole,
Wide, from their slumber's mystery, unclose
The vision-laden eyelids of the soul.

FALL

Nay, be content—our door that opens wide
On whitened fields this autumn dawn, all furred
With silver imagery, the sudden bird
That soothes the crystal air, the windless tide
Of light across the world from roof to floor—
Thy heart can ask no more.
The fringed horizon of the pines
Is delicate with frore,
And holds our world within its shadow shore,
Our world where beauty fresh with dewy wines
Sits naked at our door.
Thine eyes in mine! The vineyard's dusky bloom,
The garnered grain, are gifts of autumn's mirth;
And now, while softly through the forest gloom
The warm awakening of the good wet earth
Suspires through the dawn, we need not fear
The ceaseless pageantry of death and birth,
The swallow's passing with the changing year.
Our souls could say, “Perfection was and is;
Death comes like slumber,”—if to-morrow's sun
Should find us fallen with the summer's rose.
This moment stolen from the centuries,
This foretaste of the soul's oblivion
We hold and cherish, and because of this
Are life and death made perfect, and thy woes
Turn lyric through the glory we have won.
The morning flower that drew its petals close
And slept the cold night through is now unfurled
To catch the breathless moment; big and sane
Our autumn day forsakes the gates of rose,
And like a lion shakes its golden mane
And leaps upon the world.

SONNETS

I
TO SILENCE

Lord of the deserts 'twixt a million spheres,
Child of the moon-dawn and the naked moon,
Close comrade of the whispered afternoon,
Angel of mercy, whose absolving tears
Erase the discord of our human fears:
Thy lap is freighted with the dawn, thy heart
Is warm about the sunset, for thou art
The woof and fabric of eternal years.
Thy hand is soft upon the troubled eyes,
And, in the palace of thy sister Sleep,
Thy peace remains when Life's last echo dies.
Thou art more tender than the raptured breath
That rounds a virgin's breast, and thou dost keep
Thy kiss to lay upon the brows of Death.

II
TO THE EARTH

The heart can understand, oh, Mother Earth!
Thy tides and winds and seasons whisper, “Fate
Has held us dumb through centuries of hate,
And tears, and blood for things of little worth.”
The heart can understand, since Lilith's mirth
Shivered the early echoes, half in scorn,
The world-wide leap of light from every dawn,
Day's dying pomp around thy blood-drenched girth.
Across thy theatre pageants come and pass:
The power and pride of man, a scenic thing,
Frames forth his glory in enduring brass;
And through his dust I hear the whispering
Of lifted waters, and a blade of grass
Breaking the murmur-laden breast of Spring.

III
ESSEX

I

Thy hills are kneeling in the tardy spring,
And wait, in supplication's gentleness,
The certain resurrection that shall bring
A robe of verdure for their nakedness.
Thy perfumed valleys where the twilights dwell,
Thy fields within the sunlight's living coil,
Now promise, while the veins of nature swell,
Eternal recompense to human toil.
And when the sunset's final shades depart
The aspiration to completed birth
Is sweet and silent; as the soft tears start,
We know how wanton and how little worth
Are all the passions of our bleeding heart
That vex the awful patience of the earth.

IV
ESSEX

II

Thine are the large winds and the splendid sun
Glutting the spread of heaven to the floor
Of waters rhythmic from far shore to shore,
And thine the stars, revealing one by one.
Thine the grave, lucent night's oblivion,
The tawny moon that waits below the skies,—
Strange as the dawn that smote their blistered eyes
Who watched from Calvary when the Deed was done.
And thine the good brown earth that bares its breast
To thy benign October, thine the trees
Lusty with fruitage in the late year's rest;
And thine the men whose blood has glorified
Thy name with Liberty's divine decrees—
The men who loved thy soil and fought and died.

[V
Toward thine Eastern window when the morn]

Toward thine Eastern window when the morn
Steals through the silver mesh of silent stars,
I come unlaurelled from the strenuous wars
Where men have fought and wept and died forlorn.
But here, across these early fields of corn,
The living silence dwelleth, and the gray
Sweet earth-mist, while afar the lisp of spray
Breathes from the ocean like a Triton's horn.
Open thy lattice, for the gage is won
For which this earth has journeyed through the dust
Of shattered systems, cold about the sun;
And proved by sin, by mighty lives impearled,
A voice cries through the sunrise: “Time is just!”—
And falls like dew God's pity on the world.

VI
FOG AT SEA

Gray grisly tides that choke the master sun
Who domes the caves of sullen fog with pearl,
While round and still the sick white eddies swirl
Between the smothered vistas one by one;
Like ghosts the frail hysteric breezes run
Aslant the ashen world, and strive to furl
The slow drenched air in one enormous whirl
And free the ocean's breast it weighs upon.
The world is dying for a draught of air,
Great autumn air that like a hoarded stream
Floods the gigantic openness of dawn;
And, like the whispering of hopeless prayer,
The white world's voices, as if drowsed with dream,
Sigh through the muffled stillness and are gone.

VII
NIRVANA

I

And shall we find thee? Shall the tired soul
Toiling in gross dull clay, doomed to abide
In blurred oblivion, condemned to hide
Its eager wings impatient of control,
And God-lit eyes that yearn to view the whole
Of that divinest splendour glorified
In earth's rare visions—shall it feel the tide
Of thy calm love in endless pity roll?
Oh, let the inward vision drink the light
Of thine effulgent countenance! Then might
This immaterial dream of Thee and Me
Dissolve away like moon-mists in the morn,
And we could lapse in silence from the scorn
Of Destiny to thy great unity.

VIII
NIRVANA

II

Woof of the scenic sense, large monotone
Where life's diverse inceptions, death and birth,
Where all the gaudy overflow of earth,
Merge—they the manifold and thou the One.
Increate, complete—when the stars are gone
In cinders down the void, when yesterday
No longer spurs desire starvation-gray,
When God grows mortal in men's hearts of stone,—
As each pulsation of the Heart Divine
Peoples the chaos, or with falling breath
Beggars creation, still the soul is thine!
And still untortured by the world's increase,
Thy wide, harmonic silences of death;
And last—thy white uncovered breast of peace.

IX
PASSING DAYS

They walk across my life with great, grave eyes
That greet my questioning hands with silent scorn
And blossoms break upon their crowns of thorn,
While garlands wither that their children prize.
I kiss their lips and grow a little wise,
A little patient, while my strength is worn
Beneath the spur of each succeeding morn
That dowers its evening with a fresh surmise.
Their message dies with them, an empty word;
But memory garners, in a wild regret,
Their silent beauty that the heart preferred.
And in the fire of hopeless love they seem
So real with sorrow, that I half forget
My soul shall wake and find the days a dream.

X
ON AN ÆOLIAN HARP

Lure of the night's dædalian sea-born breath,
Wild as the heart's uncomprehended dole,
Strange as the grieving of a mighty soul
Touched with the lyric woe of life and death.
Phraser of world-wide monotones that toll
Like far enormous bells from sky to sky,
Voice of the vaster solitudes that lie
With life's solution past the mind's control.
The golden eyes of long-forgotten days,
The dolorous memory of simple things,
Sadden thy lapsing chords:—the present pays
The past's arrears of sorrow, and they seem
To wake a sense, among thy weeping strings,
Of other lives, like some unceasing dream.

XI
THE SPHINX

Oblivion like perfume from the wings
Of dim Osiris, and the calm of one
High soul, who thy remorseless lips of stone
Chiselled to mock the resonance of kings.
Thy proper silence, ripe with legend, clings
To thine inert omnipotence, endures
Though Gods and empires agonize, and lures
Strange lapses from life's echoing, brazen strings.
Thou seest new stars swing downward through the gloom,
While on her dust, who smiled and ravished Rome,
Decays the graven marble of her tomb.
The fruitful Nile, the desert in thine eyes—
Dead laughter, and dead tears—How much to come?—
Death, death, and fragile life that weeps and dies.

[XII
Whiles were, I almost seemed to understand]

Whiles were, I almost seemed to understand;
I watched the flooding waters with their fleece
Of sudden foam, and felt the ripening peace
And joy of increase that the earth had planned.
Then the great shadow fell across the land,
And in the harsh monotony of wind
I felt the past like Death about my mind,
And mild with grief put forth mine idle hand.
There was the question: each day should I be
What yesterday I was not, and for me
Of my dead self but memory remain?
And when upon my nakedness the snow
Had spread its silence, should I wake and know,
Or sleeping, dream another life as vain?

XIII
TO THE MEMORY OF W. H. P.

Life may not perish though the winds of death
Whine shrilly through the world, where we alone
Crouch in the trodden dust, and feel the moan
Of ancient sorrow burthening our breath.
The blade endureth, though it break the sheath;
Life springs and ceases in oblivion,
Gathered and scattered by the master sun
Like rain upon the waters calm beneath.
We wait like corpses in a charnel-house,
And singly, as the shrouded years return,
They loose the cere-cloth on our furrowed brows;
And one departs in splendour through the tomb,
We hear the voice of Cherubim, and turn
Weeping like children in the intenser gloom.

XIV
INSOMNIA

To wake upon the shrouded, budding sky
And sudden silence—wake and lie alone
In the gigantic solitude, and groan
To feel the sting of light upon the eye.
To wake and wait until the senses cry—
Knowing the sun shall smite upon the sea,
And rouse the tragic day that is to be,
Grief-haunted by the days that have gone by.
To wake, and wait, and lie alone, and know
That through the mist of grim familiar pain
The world is perfect music even now;
To strive and catch the master-hand that pearled
The night with song, and feel, across the rain,
A sadness as the sadness of the world.

[XV
I stood upon the old Earth's breast and gazed]

I stood upon the old Earth's breast and gazed
To where the seaward sand was gray with brine,
And heard a song-bird weeping in a pine,
Beneath the iron heaven, bent and crazed.
The sea was like an eye that death had glazed;
Amid gray light blown round the ragged marge
The fallen sun hung lustreless and large
And one thin trace of lifeless waters blazed.
I strove to feel God's pity for His men,
As, in the Galilean dawn, the love
Of Jesu widened on the human ken:—
In vain! I watched my fated evening go
Heart-broken beyond tears and round me move
The strength and sorrow of the life I know.

[XVI
Our lips are laughing while our eyes are wet]

Our lips are laughing while our eyes are wet;
The happiness we hope, the grief we fear,
The stress and anguish that our moments bear,
Are trivial shadows that our lives forget.
The day's despairing toil and passion's fret
Evanish utterly like empty words;
What was has never been; the past affords
Only a heritage of divine regret.
But whiles the sorrow of a sleeping face
Awakes a deeper pity not our own,
Or when the soul in Beauty's large embrace
Forsakes its margined slumber, we may grow
To greater moments, when we stand alone
And feel that life is sadder than we know.

XVII
THE GATE OF DREAMS

The Gate of Dreams, where, time and time again,
Through sleep transfigured with a nameless light,
Fearful, upon the tired end of night,
I come as might a devote to his fane.
The Gate of Dreams, of melancholy pain,
Flooding the drowsy labyrinthine soul
With faces of despair or patient dole—
The tragic children of a weary brain.
The Gate of Dreams, where throbs a ghostly wail,
As it were of sobbing strings and wild accords,
Where life is scenic in the smile of fate;
Where faces, shrouded in an iron veil,
Pass outward in a woe too great for words,
Or weep in haggard terror, weep and wait.

XVIII
TO GIACOMO LEOPARDI

Despair is musical, the wings of pain
Are stirred in rhythm of large winds that bear
A mute divinity of human prayer
And human sorrow that the prayer is vain.
The tears of speech that wet thy lips profane
No Muse with discord, for the world's control
Had never blurred the windows of thy soul
Nor bound the beating of thy heart with chain.
But we have piled the gates of sun with dust,
And in the jangling darkness of the earth,
With muffled hearts, exist because we must.
Our times are blasphemous: no tears, no shame,
But heaven insulted with an evil mirth
And greed exalted with a sacred name.

XIX
TO J. T. S.

After reading “Amis et Amile.”

And were they friends as thou and I are friends
That take the wind of sorrow open-eyed,
And, striving sunward though the storms divide,
Stand, speak and break amid the press that bends?
We ache to life and bear the dower it sends
Of Godless temples and of rusted sword,
With ashes of the heart the heavens scored,
Arched o'er a world unholy in its ends.
Was their love more than ours, being impearled
With sacrifice of blood and wife and child?
Ah! they, who walked the sunshine of the world
And heard grave angels speaking through a dream,
Had never their unlaurelled brows defiled,
Nor strove to stem the world's enormous stream.

XX
TO THE CHILDREN OF THE MUSE

None shall put forth a hand and twist the brass
That galls the neck of Liberty, none dare
Avert the iron stigma of despair
And show our eyes how good the battle was.
Yet now for you who, 'mid the blowing grass
That hides the grave of honour, sit and stare
In the great muteness of forgotten prayer—
The vengeance of the Lord has come to pass!
They fester in their cities who have scarred
The face of earth until her skeleton
Is naked, and her breasts are dry and hard;
Say, shall ye tear the world's dishevelled robe
And lay her ulcers open to the sun,
Or murmur soft, “Thy will be done!” like Job?

XXI
L'ENFANT DU SIÈCLE

Dim dying child be still and taste thy pain,
Poor hands be mild, for no new God appears,
And patient on thy pinnacle of years,
Dark soul forego thy Godlike task and chain
Thy longings; Faith has died and they are vain,
And thou hast lost the power of natural tears,
And memories that thy dateless childhood bears
Have blurred thy living days like sterile rain.
The soul's sweet choristers that once did toll
Thro' God's immensity are fallen dumb;
As when the accorded harps and martial drum,
Thro' some vast palace where a kingly soul
Has passed away, are hushed; and thou shalt come
Thro' life a mourner, mute and pitiful.

XXII
AUX MODERNES

I

Only an empty platitude for God,
Only for poetry a jangling nerve,
Only for life the baser lusts to serve,
Only a fashion where the function stood.
Only a shadow stealing span on span
Over the unmeasured whiteness of the soul;
Darkness around the God-established goal
That blazed before the innocence of man.
And when the flame of adolescence breaks
On some wild heart the world has overthrown,
He stares as one who waits alone and wakes,
Cheated of love and faith, his vision drawn
Haggard and hopeless from his death-bed down
The hard, gray, tacit distances of dawn.

XXIII
AUX MODERNES

II

When I have learned the accents of your speech,
The splendid grief of silence; when I know
Your acrid laughter and your tearless woe,
And learn the shame of life—what you can teach;
When dust returns to dust, and mutely each
Grows haggard thro' the fard—then I shall say,
“Your foolish lips have lied from day to day,
And life has reached the goal that life must reach.”
And then a hush—and then a mighty thought
Shall move upon the fabric of your lives
As thro' a tavern window looms the dawn;
And in your tarnished tinsel, in the scorn
Of guttered candles, all your lives have sought
And you shall fade and finish—Truth survives!

[XXIV
Of this that I have written none is mine]

Of this that I have written none is mine,
Save only as my clouded sense has heard
And blurred with ineffectual rhyme the Word
Whose Virgin silence was and is divine.
The veins of God are filled with golden wine
Perturbed with splendour, and this world we dream
Around our tinsel lives endows a theme
Of music—Hearken! for its voice is thine!
The Youth and Beauty of the earlier earth
Have never died, but on the breast of song
They lie like flowers—'t is we that agonize!
And in the gray senescence of our birth
Erase the soul whose voice condemns the wrong,
And move our fingers through the dust we prize.

XXV
TO A STATUE

Deep Soul that may not hold the brazen mould,
Spirit whose silence bideth to the moon,
Thou Goddess of the closing afternoon,
Who gazeth where the tidal air is cold—
Thine eyes have watched beyond the stars grown gold,
That polar silence where the shrouded spheres
Stir slightly through the mist of little years,
For thou wert never born, nor young, nor old.
Goddess without a shrine to bear the prayer
Of thy few faithful, whose despair has won
A mourning fillet for thy solemn hair:
The soul shall hear thee sigh beyond the cry
Of Time, and fallen headlong from the sun,
Shall find thy pity in the vaster sky.

XXVI
A DREAM

I dreamed the world of noon was stricken blind:
A sun, so haggard that it starved the air,
Scarcely sufficed to light the stark despair
Of tearless millions shrieking to the wind.
Then, leering on the world, a hellish mind
Drawn in a hearse, raved silently of pain;
The voices died and silence laid the strain
Of unforgotten anguish on mankind.
Upon their bones the flesh of men grew gray,
All nature withered in a wild regret,
And maddened whispers scared the ashy sun:
“No more,” they moaned, “men's hearts, like drops of spray,
Shall touch their ocean, mingle and forget—
This is the burial of oblivion!”

XXVII
“ELI! ELI! LAMA SABACTHANI!”

The glare of Hell it was, the haggard light,
And tragic to His ears, from Galilee,
Like wailing children sobbed His native sea:
Then on the cruel nails He strained upright
With sinews drawn as steel, and cast His sight
Over the blackness, but He might not see—
Even He the Christ. He plucked against the tree
With piteous hands, and called across the night
Thrice upon God the Father—none replied!
The Heavens were void; ecstatic voices cried,
“Despair! Despair! in death ye may not die!”
He heard: the great sweat beaded on His face,
The vital sob urged outward, and a space
Rose through dissolving faith the Eternal Lie!

XXVIII
DANTE

Thy voice—all its least tones, the strain and stir
Measured and ardent, and the mighty trend
Outward upon a light-pervaded end,
Gained through the fields of flame and hideous blur.
Thou art sonorous as the shuddering fir
Thwarting the tempest, nor thy metres bend
Under their splendid freight, when thou dost blend
Power and light and love to speak of Her.
Inward thy flame arose and strong with strife
Shone in thy words—thou art to me as life,
Beaten, renewed with hope, and undestroyed.
Thy voice comes pure to me as waters falling,
Swells till it seems I hear the Seraph calling
Through open spaces of the dayless void.

XXIX
LOVE

I

Sadder and more divine than human tears
Born on the eyes to utter what is dumb,
This simple silence when the heart grows numb
Among the dead desires of perished years.
Such silence quivers with the song it bears,
Unsung within a fabric of old pain,
Till in the dust of tired passions, plain
Through wreaths of light, the naked truth appears.
Then poised upon the moment thou canst lay
Thy brow upon the Heart of Hearts, and feel
The tide that ebbs and waxes through us all;
Till from the silence, through the world's decay,
A voice shall speak to thee like beaten steel,
Lest on thy sea of sun the shadows fall.

XXX
LOVE

II

It flows thro' all of time from heart to heart,
This solemn wonder fresh with naked strength,
This source of life where every mouth at length
Must drink and feel the old impulsions start.
It is the whole that moves through every part,
The aspiration dim of things unborn,
The prophecy of life's essential dawn,
That tears the everlasting night apart.
And we who are, and were the splendid spur
For wasted generations, we must bear
For human sake the same gigantic stir
Of breathless longing, and the great command
Of life to life, and leave our spirits bare
To feel the truth they cannot understand.

[XXXI
I dreamed of Thee, O Wonder, with the sheen]

I dreamed of Thee, O Wonder, with the sheen
Amid thy temples of a sanguine gem,
And warm, between thy garment's purple hem,
The languid passions of that Persian Queen
Who sate with she-slaves in her quiet gloom,
And felt the sob of fountains and the keen
Perfume of lotus, and the murmurous lean
Of windy flowers, and life's impending doom.
O dream of dazzled senses and the pain
Of conscious happiness! I woke beneath
The dark maturing dawn, while earth again
Renewed its patient toil for human sake,
And felt the tender calm of such a death
As thine, O Wonder, dream whose death it was to wake.

[XXXII
She came once only in a dream of death]

She came once only in a dream of death
And touched my face with wise, unhurried hand,
And, “Man,” her silence said, “I understand—
The end is now, and quiet now, and faith.”
And lotos-like and moved with tender breath,
Her breast was calm as night and pale and bare,
And, watching thro' the gloom of burnished hair,
Her solemn eyes were deep, and tears beneath.
And tears were on the lips that kissed her mouth,
And only tears could speak to her, and tears
Fell burning on her breast—the tears of youth.
And life, and evermore its weariness
Was dim forgotten pain, the iterate years
Were ceased, the roar of time was echoless.

[XXXIII
The low moon quivers on the hyacinth sky,]

The low moon quivers on the hyacinth sky,
And lays upon the ocean's glooming frown
Its frail caress; like silence tenderly
The shadow falls immeasurably down.
A smouldering flame perturbs the heaven's girth,
As might, in some great moment, silently,
A sudden vision of the tragic earth
Blazon the brows of God with mystery.
And thou shalt come as the great shadow falls,
Like the slow single star, and lay thy last
Ethereal kiss upon my tired eyes;
And I shall answer thee as one who calls
Through the dumb places of the haunted past,
Drinking its fulness ere the moment dies.

[XXXIV
Tell me again, and then lift up to me]

Tell me again, and then lift up to me
Those frail white arms of thine and touch my face,
And wrap me wholly in thine eyes' embrace,
Till God's sure hand run fire round me and thee.
Tell me again, and let thy speaking be
A faint phrased echo, delicate as lace,
Of seas sonorous through the void of space,
The low, lost rhythm of immensity.
Tell me again, and where thy breasts divide
Pillow my weariness—the breath of fall
Shall blow crisp, crimson leaves upon thy hair;
Thy presence is as where a song has died,
And left its memory grieving over all
This vital solitude of autumn air.

[XXXV
Give me thy pitiful, soft-moulded hand]

Give me thy pitiful, soft-moulded hand,
And we will bide in silence, Thou and I;
Within the choirèd poem of the sky
Thine is the voice I cannot understand.
Give me thy hand and let the heart command:
My mind is blurred, and yet I seem to know
Darkly what men have spoken of, and now
The Word itself their lips have never spanned,
Nor I shall ever speak it, nor shall they
That illustrate to-morrow with their birth;
The tongue is tethered—we can just obey;
And from the gates of sunrise issue dumb,
Illumined—while the spirit of the earth
Reveals her secret, knowing we have come.

[XXXVI
If I have touched thy heart, as Solomon]

If I have touched thy heart, as Solomon,
When seemed the world dissolving in a kiss,
Upon the pages wonder-white with prayer
With lyric fingers laid his rose of song;
And if the most I am is just—a man,
Why yet, Belovèd, in that I am thine,
I must not ask forgiveness; this I write
Is all and more than I can say I am;
Like veilèd music through the threadbare words
Thy heart is beating even now, for I
Have seen the morning quicken through its sleep
In cycles of dim song. Thou canst not say
What I have given is deserving scorn,
For I have naught to give that is not Thine.

XXXVII
TOO SOON

His wordless voice was like a toiling dream;
I waited, stupid in my wasted hope,
And felt the winds, beneath the heavens cope,
Stir like the pulse of some vast gradual stream.
This was the end. I heard again his scream
Of perfect fear, and felt about me furled
The naked hate of all the living world:—
God's eyes looked into mine nor were supreme!
The crawling fear had thrust his jaws apart
And fixed his lidless eyes against the wall,
And Death held back the tides within his heart;
I cried, “For Pity, tell me if she lied!”
Then came the hideous simper, and a small
Mute whisper writhed upon his lips and died.

XXXVIII
TOO LATE

While over all the sullen embers gloat,
Silence, forgetfulness and only now
The twilight of your hair across my brow,
And soft my kiss upon your marble throat.
Be still—great visions through the quiet float,
And while the wind is wailing at our door,
And day retires in gloom across the moor,
Time shall forget an hour and grow remote
And—Hush! The fire is dull between your hair:
My tear upon your breast your curtained eyes
Have answered—it is all the heart can bear!
Peace! Peace! there's pity in the soul of pain,
And now our lives fulfil their destinies—
Hark! the despairing whisper of the rain.

XXXIX
THE NIGHT-WIND

Echoless voice of few sufficing chords,
Soft as the memory of a vaster rest,
Secret as sorrow held within the breast
Of one whose silence never stoops to words.
Harp of waste waters by thy hands caressed,
Chalice of music—prayer and song and strife—
Filled with that wine that drowns the ills of life
When the last vineyards of the soul are pressed.
Prophet of final calm where life shall cease,
Cease and a kind forgetfulness of soul
Fall like a balm upon the wounds of peace—
Thy voice shall soothe the last and sternest fight,
Threading the dark dim solitudes of night,
Like life without a prelude or a goal.

[XL
And they shall say to thee, “He died distraught]

And they shall say to thee, “He died distraught;
His mind was crazed by dreaming on things past,
And so he grew in madness till the last
Sheer height of scorn he tottered from to naught.
His hands were weak and idle and ne'er caught
With strength of purpose at the busy world;
Forlorn and proud he stood—Time onward whirled
And left the ruins of the things he sought.”
But thou shalt understand what they despise,
Cherish what they reject, and count the few
Poor virtues dearer than the things they prize.
And weighing all the evil they have said,
Thy heart shall say, “What, then, if this be true?
Be Silent! for he loved me and is dead.”

A LAST WORD

POEMS (1899–1902)

TO W. W.

I toss upon Thy grave,
(After Thy life resumed, after the pause, the backward glance of Death;
Hence, hence the vistas on, the march continued,
In larger spheres, new lives in paths untrodden,
On! till the circle rounded, ever the journey on!)
Upon Thy grave,—the vital sod how thrilled as from Thy limbs and breast transpired,
Rises the spring's sweet utterance of flowers,—
I toss this sheaf of song, these scattered leaves of love!
For thee, Thy Soul and Body spent for me,
—And now still living, now in love, transmitting still Thy Soul, Thy Flesh to me, to all!—
These variant phrases of the long-immortal chant
I toss upon Thy grave!

OUTWARD

THE VOYAGE

A SONG FOR WAKING

THE GREEK GALLEY

THE WORLD'S TOO LONG ABOUT US

LES BOURGEOIS

A SONG FOR REVOLUTION

THE HERITAGE

THE PASSAGE

DAY AND DARK

RETROSPECT

SONNETS

[I
Cut loose! Hoist sail! Leave the familiar shores]

Cut loose! Hoist sail! Leave the familiar shores
Of life! Drive out on love's enormous wind
Far from the safe small pieties and blind
Tangles of conscience! O set wide the doors
And throw the strong arms open utterly!
Go forth reckless with faith and unresigned,
Thus only seeking shall you surely find
The peril and rapture of true liberty!
Thus only shall divine discoveries
Stretch the vague margins of the conscious soul
And fire the peaks of more inclusive skies;
Thus may we burst the self-created bond
Of sordid fears and hear life's surges roll
On shores of truth that always lie beyond!

[II
Would I were hopeful as the tender leaves]

Would I were hopeful as the tender leaves,
Would I were faithful as the myriad grass,
Kindling conviction in the ways I pass;
Would I believed as every flower believes!
The pale wheat springs and flowers, the golden sheaves
Serve in their turn—the Earth's religion brings
Proof of the power and miracle of things,
That none are infidel and no thing grieves.
No thing in nature grieves and all things die;
Yea! from their burial Life is born anew:
O faithful grass of graves!—perchance when I
Change to the earth's desire, my soul shall take
Thy lesson of faith and joy and still renew
My journey onward for the journey's sake!

[III
The earth is glad of travail and labouring]

The earth is glad of travail and labouring:
The flower the whole sun's kiss is spent upon,
The leaves light, as of sea depths smitten with sun
And musical with incessant murmuring,—
Bound as a girdle, the strong sea's silver ring,
Where thro' and thro' the deep, clear hair of night
Stars tread the chattering tides and swollen with light
Moon walks beneath the slow dawn's fervent wing,—
Earth, sea,—to them the large, fresh, passionate deed
Of life is glad and wise—how wise is faith!
Life's harvest flowers, death sows the exhaustless seed:
We probe the intention till the soul has won
Vista,—awake at last! Yea! journeying on
Equal and wise and free with life and death!

[IV
How long the impassive feet of Time have trod]

How long the impassive feet of Time have trod
The myriads and their monuments to dust!
How long the frailest, loveliest leaves have trust!
How long life urges in the reeking sod!
The flower is witless of a master's rod,
The sunlight warms the unjust with the just,
The he-bird, joyous in his vernal lust,
Carols in native ignorance of God.
And, when the travesty of God's control
And human reason leave us at the last
Naked before the all-receptive Soul,
Incurious of the ends of life and death,
Numb with the monstrous effort of our past,
We pray the bird for joy, the flower for faith.

[V
Most lone and loveliest star, in glimmering spheres]

Most lone and loveliest star, in glimmering spheres
Of twilight hung, as tho' the lids of night,
In one liquescent utterance large as light,
Let fall the delicate silver of her tears;
Monotonous music mute to mortal ears,
Vibrant as birds that cry across the bright
Silence and thro' the distance tense and white,
Where loud as life the incessant dawn appears.
Thou art, O star, how like a conscious soul
Leaving the shadowy shores of life to blend
Deep in the lustre of its native sea!
Or like, in heaven, the pure and liquid toll
Of one unechoing bell to mark the end
Of God's rule and man's infidelity!

[VI
Most lone and loveliest star, in glimmering spheres]

Most lone and loveliest star, in glimmering spheres
Has flowed, and murmuring, teased thine ignorance!
How many a derelict from the winds of chance
Has signaled some unguessed eternity!
The passion and pulse and power of all the sea
Fills the thin foam with fierce significance,
And thro' the sea-moods, to the deeper glance,
Pierces the same intention utterly.
Still, from life's shores to sea-ward, can the soul,
Glimmering in dawn, spread out a wider pool
Of light and vision till shadows flow to flame,
As one by one we dare include the whole
Of human change within our scope, nor school
Our hearts to virtue more than sin and shame.

[VII
Mine is the bellowing, all-receiving sea]

Mine is the bellowing, all-receiving sea,
Mine the long beaches blurred with drifted foam,
Mine the blind earth, the human lights of home,
The midnight shuddering, deepening endlessly.
Mine is the world to-night! Yea! Mine shall be
Vistas and vaster worlds, a certain dower,
When after faith, free love and conscious power,
Soul dares desire its own infinity.
Naught can be asked or given for all is ours:
Ours of all space the cold incessant miles,
Ours of all time the full, unstinting hours;
And ours the sea beyond, that round the warm
Shores of our being whiles will sleep and whiles
Breathe thro' the soul the epic voice of storm.

VIII
THE POET

He comes last of the long processional,
Last of the perfect lovers, doomed as they
To live ever more lonely day by day
By all rejected and condemned by all.
Hands stretch to hold him, passionate voices call,
Bright lips beseech him,—yet he cannot stay.
Treading in the large night his outward way
He learns how much the crowns are spiritual.
His heaven is godless since his faith is whole;
No thing but finds in him a perfect love,
No flower, no star but buds within his soul.
Labor and sleep, the warmth of home belong
To all but him,—he feels instead thereof
His heart's blood smelted to the ore of song.

ODE TO THE SEA

ODE TO THE EARTH

I

II

O earth across thy sentient sleep,
Like silent maidens, one by one,
Meseems thy countless days, dead daughters of the sun,
Their unforgetful journey keep.
Meseems beneath the masque of night,
Clear in thy dreams, their large, remorseful eyes
Always are overflowed with quenchless light;
While, from their cataract of golden hair,
Falls an ethereal fragrance and their shattered skies
Are swayed with elemental tides of air.
For surely when the world is fain
Of thy desire that never dies,
Thy toil of child-birth stirs again
The mighty legend of thy memories,
Till, even as when the feet of Lilith pressed
Thy fruitless sod and roused the tardy spring,
Pale in thy florid sleep, thy daughters bring
Thrills of remembrance yearning in thy breast,
And this to-night is stirred, as one by one,
Rain-robed or bright with raiment of the sun,
Like some processional of barefoot boys,
They move across thy dream and all their pain,
Their gifts, too generous, and their splendid joys
Seem like loved voices lost and heard again.

III

Surely as, when the firmamental airs
Grow, in a warm and lovelier noonday, sweet
With flowers thy fruitful bosom bears,
Forth from thy vistaed memories flow
Thy life's unnumbered days that tread with ghostly feet
Thy large and dreamful slumber, so
Seen in the truth of thine essential mood,
All things that were return and none can die
Save for the ends of life. God knows if I,
Tired with all the task of time,
Died at thy breast, my cold and pulseless blood
Would stir to feel the essential ichor climb
The world's wide uplands, or beside
My cheek the winds grow warm, or on my mouth the sweet
Savour of sunrise, or against my naked side
The thrust of earliest grass, the chill of dew.
Yea! even my mere mute flesh would wake anew,
O earth of graves and flowers, as thou dost take
The burden of new birth for mere life's sake!

IV

Grant me to know thy larger love! If I
Alway must go, beneath the self-same sky,
Thro' life and death and can no more depart,—
Grant, if I wisely serve thy large commands,
That rivers of thine own rhythm drown my heart!
For now meseems my life is grown,
Vain as a shattered bowl
To hold the essential vintage of the soul.
Change me from small endeavors crazed to win
Mean ends for aims whose littleness is sin
To moods profound, effusive, all thine own;
Till, flower by flower I understand
As day by day the miracles expand!

V

Now spring from seaward blows, anon
The winds grow cold as one by one
They take the withering leaves,—thro' storm and calm
Thy lips are flowing with the eternal psalm
Of moving seas, but still beneath the masque
Of seas and seasons in their tireless task
Thy mood is silence and thy gift is grace!
Tho' endless years replenish and efface,
Thou art as one whose soul beneath the test
Of human agony and human strife,
This restless interlude of life,
Is conscious of eternal rest
In spheres whose very scope is peace!
Thou sayest that life shall never cease,
Yet now I dream that death has ceased to be
And life has ceased; Yea! Life appears to me
A bowl of Lethean wine whose margin's curve
Is burned and bitter with the eager kiss
Of myriads tortured by the thirst they serve.
While in my dreams thy natural pieties
Seem as the phases of the soul that is
But neither lives nor dies!
And when at last my visions fade to this
Level of lawn, and when thy silences
Are mightily 'stablished, as the emphatic hand
Of darkness stays the cries of sleepy birds
And turns the golden breezes blind and bland,
Then all my dreams, desires and words
Depart and leave me silent with the deep
Meanings of silence; thro' my darkened mind
Light buds, as now, thro' tides of warmer wind,
Stars blossom on the night, and life seems large as sleep.
Then idly, tenderly, my hand
Falls on thy flowers still fresh with happy rain
And wise with tears I seem to understand
The purposes of pain!

THE JOURNEY ON

I

II

FOR E. L.

I

She stands before me till the space grows void,
And round her form the desert's sterile heat
Throbs with the tread of strong, impassive feet
And song in fanes She builded and destroyed.
The tideless waters swell and fall, the beat
Of sunlight thrills along her limbs and glows
On jade and turquoise, and her even brows
With myrrh and natron seem forever sweet.
She, child of mightier days and larger loves,
Stands like a silence in the sound of life,
And recent things about her beauty seem
Vain and unlovely as our human strife;
Wise and ineffable as Truth She moves
As moves a great thought thro' a foolish dream.

II

III

IV

Pour down thy hair between the world and me!
Between myself and my exhausted soul
Spread, in the dreadful vistas where my goal
Saddens and fails, thy love's euthanasy!
Fold me away from Time and let me be
Silent and ceased from bitterness, be thou
Tacit as childhood and thine ivory brow
Thoughtless, and be thou tender utterly!
Strength, give me strength to spare the futile tears!
Give me the consciousness of something proved:
Faith, wisdom, personal and briefly true.
I sift the scant, earned knowledge of my years
Like dust between my hands, and all I loved
And hoped and dreamed dissolves and blends to you!

V

VI

Thy breast is stainless as a star, thy hand
Is calm and white and slow and thou dost come
Sweet as a long-remembered song of home
Heard thro' the twilight of an alien land.
Thine eyes are pure and still, they understand
More than our thoughts surmise, and stately dreams
Hover about thee and thy presence seems
Calm with a ceaseless custom of command.
With memories of thy face the ways of time
Are splendid, and my hours divinely stirred
With tremor and silence as of unshed tears.
Thou dost resume, as tho' the sea's sublime
Music were uttered in a single word,
The warm magnificence of earlier years.

VII

O murmur and passionate silence of to-night!
Earth of sublime arrival!—Let there creep,
Like music thro' the muffled gloom of sleep,
Tremors of Life's imperishable might,
Whether from airs that range the steep starred height
Of heaven, or where the delicate dew is deep
On grass and flowers, or where the bird-cries leap
Loud down the pathways mute and bare with light.
Fabric of night, O easeful rest, O airs
Kissing her cheek, O flowers that feel her feet,
O Life, O earth's impetuous utterance!—
We stand to-night the fit and faithful heirs
To Life's inheritance,—the power, the sweet
Strong motive, and the Soul's ecstatic trance!

VIII

Star of the sumptuous dusk and silent air,
Thou loveliest child and latest-born of night,
Jewel that binds the solemn brows of light
Swept by its lustre of luxurious hair;
O star of sundawn like a thread of prayer
Weaved thro' the fabric of a song of bright
Echoes and passionate notes of life's delight:—
O throbbing heart of heaven, unstained and bare!
Thou, in thy twilight, art as tho' her hand
Dawned thro' the glamour of a gorgeous dream;
And as to me her loveliness is shed
Thro' depths of ancient time, I see thee stand
Exalted and thro' endless space thy beam
Fall pure and steadfast on the world I tread.

IX

X

XI

XII

THE SONNETS OF ISHTAR

[I
I am the world's imperishable desire]

I am the world's imperishable desire;
Life is because I will, for hope of me
Life is, nor all the dark depths of the sea
Could quench mine eyes' light nor my body's fire.
Fresh hyacinth and the violent rose suspire,
The black clod breaks to green eternally,
Sap thrills to parturition the naked tree,—
Of all things living I only cannot tire.
I am the world's interminable sin;
Yea! In my power and lust beyond control,
Things mortal wage the war of life and win.
For me the slave defies the master's rod,
And while the antique pride swells within his soul
The man reclaims his liberty of God!

[II
My face lives always in the quenchless light]

My face lives always in the quenchless light,
Frail gold of twilight burns across my breast,
The red dusk girds me and my limbs are pressed
In warm, wan shadows deepening down to night.
My hair, red gold on brows of faultless white,
Inspires earth's children to my fatal quest;
Youth's passionate face in mortal hope of rest
Grows blind against me, wearying of my might.
With ravenous lips men scourge my lustrous flesh
And crowd the quivering dusk with nameless sin;
Death takes them, still insatiate, from my mesh.
Viewless, my feet pash down the one who dies,
While, sprung aloft from earth he festers in,
I watch the last-born laughing in mine eyes!

III
Once was my name as fire, and once my wine

Once was my name as fire, and once my wine
Flushed in the veins of youth, and once the strong,
The wise, the lyric, leaped beneath my thong
Of love and hailed me human and divine!
Mine was the world's confessed desire and mine
The echoing thunder of the seas of song,
Priests, virgins, youths—a florid, sumptuous throng—
Gave me luxurious service at my shrine!
Now tho', bereft, I seem perchance as one
Smothered in night whose memory keeps the flush,
The fire and huge transcendence of the sun,
Still, in the apostate world, my fight I know
Is won, and still the lips of manhood crush,
And still the pained blood throbs thro' limbs of snow!

IV
For me, the eldest and the loveliest God,

For me, the eldest and the loveliest God,
For me and for my equal happiness
The woman aches with sweet maternal stress,
The slow seed breaks beneath the reeking sod.
For me the strong, swift feet of dawn are shod
With fire, for me the flowers' frail petals press
Fearless and faithful, and warm winds caress
The violet sea-ways where of old I trod.
For me the long, resounding years return
With gradual seasons, and the stately sun
Shepherds thro' void infinity his brood;
And only thro' my knowledge man may turn,
To larger consciousness the soul has won,
Leaving his outworn body for my food.

AD SERVAM

SAPPHICS

TANNHÄUSER TO VENUS

TWILIGHT

SONG

SONNETS

[I
Strong saturation of sea! O widely flown,]

Strong saturation of sea! O widely flown,
Far winds of fall, your litanies of pain
Moan like the music of a wild refrain
Heard thro' the midnight of a feudal town!
Young night is lipped with jasper where the blown
Burden of evening lights intensely wane,
And, shuddering seaward from the tawny plain,
Vague fold on fold the enormous dark comes down.
Gusty and fervid as the sleepless sea
The passionate fancies of a formless fear
Spring in my nervous brain like monstrous flowers;
The night, the wind-chant work their will of me,
And thoughts like death-bells echoing far and near,
Toll for life's lost, irrevocable hours.

[II
How many a life must thou the journey keep]

How many a life must thou the journey keep,
O soul, thro' sexual seasons of the years?
O heart, how many a harvest of thy tears
Shall life's sharp sword of unfulfillment reap?
The breath of dawn shall blow—haply with tears!—
How oft, O heart, O soul, before the deep
Darkness and still eternity of sleep
Bring natural justice for life's long arrears?
Ah! when my rose of life is ripe to fall,
Pray God I sink thro' gardens of the sun
Till the dead fingers of oblivion
Constrain my heart, and there lie over me
The tideless waters and the eventual
Darkness of death's unlit, unlifting sea!

[III
Come home to me at last! Come home to me]

Come home to me at last! Come home to me!
Bring me thy youth of tears and great desires;
Frail round thy tired head the music tires,
The music shed between the stars and sea!
While still thy youth is echoing with its free
Love-songs resounding like a storm of lyres,
Come with thy deeds and dreams;—and thro' the fires
Of wisdom sift the ash of memory.
Come home to me at last! Life whispers, “Come!”
Yea! thro' the mist of passions sad with loss,
Strong in the sumptuous dusk, the light of home,
The light of soul where thou must journey, lays,
While spring is sweet in all the old dear ways,
A splendour and a sacrament across!

[IV
Hush, child! Be still and give thy fingers rest]

Hush, child! Be still and give thy fingers rest,
Thine eyes the darkness, and thy lips that press
Hard on the lips of life with fierce caress,
Ease from their hunger and thy guideless quest.
Ask of the vacant eyes and stirless breast
Of life's last angel, pale Forgetfulness,
Peace, and release from thought's eternal stress:
She, of life's violent, fervent Gods, is best.
Peace, child! Beneath her hand the fretful flame
Of long desire grows frail and faint as dream:
The immediate life is alien to despair.
Held on her heart seem life and death the same,
And nothing is at all and all things seem,
And if life dies thou shalt not even care!

[V
Then cried the song of Life: “The flowers that fall]

Then cried the song of Life: “The flowers that fall,
Spendthrift of perfume, shall return again
Fed by the tireless earth and fragrant rain:
Far down the glimmering sea the musical
Lips of the dawn repeat their clarion call;
Always the heart shall kindle to regain
Love's young desire whose very strength is pain,
For life is love and love is best of all!”
Then breathed an elder music: “I am peace!
Peace of the silent soul, sphered in such wise
That no thing lives or dies, is pleased or sad
In me, where hope and prayer and struggle cease!
Wise with my light thy calm and steadfast eyes
Beholding death shall not be even glad!”

DEATH IN YOUTH

LULLABY

AFTER DEATH

WOMEN

FIRST

[I
She said: “O take me! Let my life become]

She said: “O take me! Let my life become
Part of your pleasure. As the rose that leaf
By leaf falls scented from the crimson sheaf
You loved, even so, until my life is numb
And bare with giving, till the total sum
Of joy my life contains, to serve your need
Is spent, till all the music of my reed
Is played to please you, till you leave me, dumb—
So am I yours! to love you till you tire
Of love. I give so little!—yet the whole:
The best and worst of me, my body and soul!
O take me! Yours the nobler part, to take
Unrecompensed my prodigal desire
That pains me and would kill me for your sake!”

[II
He said: “Enough! I take you and repay]

He said: “Enough! I take you and repay
Nothing you give, but waste your sacrifice;
I let your body and soul alone suffice,
Your fierce love's largess lure me for a day.
Held in my power your soul shall cease to pray,
Your lips forget their pieties to entice
My lips, and death at last shall film with ice
Your desolate heart once drained and cast away.
Come to me! You shall utterly be turned
Into my pleasure, till my satiate sense
Sickens to see you, till your flesh is burned
Dry in my service, till the soul you staked
Against a careless kiss is lost, till hence
I drive you, with the thirst you nourished, slaked!”

[III
She said: “Thank God! Beloved, I merely ask]

She said: “Thank God! Beloved, I merely ask
Sufferance for love and me. My soul? I stake
It, swift to lose the bauble for your sake,
To spill the liquor as I break the flask!”
She held the cup: then suddenly the masque
Shattered before him, and the woman, real
And soul-transfigured with matured ideal,
Faced him—divine to meet her mortal task.
As sunlight breaks thro' vistas grey with rain,
The breathless truth broke briefly on his brain.
He paused and felt her fail to understand.
She, desolate, shuddered watching him depart;
The miracle of love's divine command
Filled him, the gospel of the human heart!

SECOND

[I
“Sweet from my sin I rise before you, rise]

“Sweet from my sin I rise before you, rise,
Wild as the vision and savour of the sea,
Bland as the shadow of sleep's euthanasy
Shed between burning lids and aching eyes!
Clothed in love's fire that damns and purifies,
Mistress and slave, I yield me utterly,—
Yours by the gods my love reveals to me,
The gods my pitiless passion crucifies!
Love for love's sake my body is born again
Thrilled with a new virginity, my soul
Lends my desire the dignity of pain.
For you my lips are fire, my naked breast
Profound as sleep and heavens of splendour roll
Over me, shattered with divine unrest!”

[II
He said, “I take you. Yet the laughter slips]

He said, “I take you. Yet the laughter slips,
Mocking your sacrifice. Be still! The phrase
Is vain since sense with equal joy repays
Loss of the soul we crush between our lips.
Where 's soul, my Mistress, when thy finger-tips
Drip wine till candles wither blaze by blaze,
And down thy breast no song can fitly praise
Pale drop by drop the ooze of daylight drips?
Why vex the mind? Why ponder—‘Mine the gain
Her gold against my dross;—the sacrifice
Damns in acceptance—Heart must yield the pain
Of Heart due reverence, give the greater gift
Denial?’ To scruple so were over-nice.—
Drown me in all your hair my fingers lift!”

[III
“Heart to my heart,” she cried, “and mouth to mine]

“Heart to my heart,” she cried, “and mouth to mine!
Lie close! I feel you like the pulse of life!
Desire has pained my senses like a knife:
Lie close, that I may know my body thine!
Surely the pangs of love are all divine,
And haply tho' my ways of love be dark
Their depths may kindle with the saving spark!
At least my incense floats before the shrine!”
“Give me thy lips!” he cried—and then his mind
Suffered with truth. He said, “My soul was blind!”
“And mine,” she said, “till love disclosed the light.”
He fell beside her, “Speak!” he cried, “for me,
For me the loveless—where is hope?” And she
Soothed him as tho' a child who wept for fright.

AT DAYBREAK

THE FINAL WORD

TO C. L. G.

THE SONG OF MAN

CAIN

CHARACTERS OF THE DRAMA:

• Adam
• Eve
• Cain
• Abel
• The Voice of God

ACT I

GENESIS

CHAPTER II

16. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

[OMITTED]

1. Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2. And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

[OMITTED]

22. And the Lord God said, Behold, THE MAN IS BECOME AS ONE OF US, TO KNOW GOOD AND EVIL: and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever:

23. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken.

[OMITTED]

1. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.

2. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

[OMITTED]

A vast, naked plain. Mountains in the remote background. In the foreground a rude tent of skins. The dark twilight of the first flush of dawn. No sound or motion is anywhere in the world.

Time: early spring; the twenty-eighth year since the birth of Cain.

Eve appears at the door of the tent and looks forth toward the sunrise.

EVE
The rapt silence! The dark twilight!—It dawns!
The multitude of the ineffable stars
That lamped the viewless parapets of heaven,
Melt in the light like pearls in golden wine;
The void globe of the calm firmament
Glows; the immemorable ecstasy
Thrills in the vital fabric of creation,
And—hark!—a bird wakes somewhere in the world!
Somewhere a burst seed splits the naked sod,
Somewhere a flower folded at evening
Petal by petal bares its inmost heart
In perfect trust and drinks the dewfall!—Life,
O Life, imperishable and resistless! Life,
Fragile as joy and free as destiny!
O breath of life tender and passionate,
Sweet breath of sap and imminent foliage
Blown thro' the level ether and low light!

From within the tent, the voice of ADAM, talking in his sleep.
The voice of ADAM
Give me the fruit! How fair it is! It seems
As it were a globe of light—give me the fruit!
His eyes are strange and glad and perilous!
Eve, hast thou wondered how his eyes are strange?
Nay then—my soul is strong and I will eat!
Give me the fruit, give me the heritage!
Yea! I will wander in the sky-gardens
And meet with level eyes the vision of God!
Give me the fruit!

EVE
Adam!

The voice of ADAM
—the deed is done!
Silence! Silence! The deathless deed is done!
See how he stares!—His coils are flecked with flame,
His eyes challenge!—O God! what comes to pass?—
A wind of flight stirs in the wings of Peace
And peril haunts the glades of Paradise—

A pause. EVE listens intently.
The voice of ADAM
My soul cowers!—What have I done?—Crouch low,
Woman, crouch low! Pray God the night will suddenly
Cover us from his ken! Eve! Eve!—His voice,
The voice of God!—Justice, Omnipotent,
Justice! The guilt is alien to my soul—
I say not mine, not mine the sin, Lord God!
The woman tempted me and I did eat!

EVE
O vain repentance!

ADAM
Staggering forth, still unawakened, from the tent.
Eve!—Utterly lost!
His hand has loosed the four relentless winds
Against this delicate toy of His creation,
And lifted out of Chaos the elder night,
And set against the paths to Paradise
Seraphim and the sword of circling flame!
And we—we go beyond! O night and death!
O woman, woman, woman,—where is Eden?
At this point ADAM wakes suddenly. A long pause. Slowly he regains complete consciousness, still shaken and afraid.
The light—the life—Eve!

EVE
Adam—

ADAM
Art thou there?

EVE
Take both my hands,

ADAM
—the dream!

EVE
Ghosts! Ghosts!

ADAM
The dream!
Visions! Visions!—O shield me, take my hands!
Let my face lie against thy breast a while—
I dreamed of Paradise and God—no more,
No more! I am too shaken utterly!
Vague am I, vague and desolate as mist!
My soul suffers—O heart, how sad it is!
Life is too tragic of its memories—
Hold me—I need thy tenderness, I need
Thy calm and pitiful hands to comfort me.

EVE
Be still a little, all will be well I know.

ADAM
Say nothing more, for naught avails me now!
There is no other balm but silence. Mine
Are woes too real for words, too wild for tears.

EVE
See out of heaven how there is shed upon thee
The light of dawn—

ADAM
All other light is lost—
The light of God, the light of happiness!—
O memories, dreams!—

EVE
Vain agonies!

ADAM
Vain joys,
Vain life, vain death,—what is not vain and void?
The soul dries up with fear to think of it!
God knows my dreams are very terrible!
God knows there is no laughter in my life,
And in my slumbers no forgetfulness!

EVE
I say, vain agonies! Life cannot be
Itself a glad or sad thing; grief and joy
Are mere interpretations of the soul,
Brief and changeable gloom or splendour shed
Down the wide ways of Life's eternal sea!
Joy is the temper of heroic minds—

ADAM
Grief is the stern acknowledgment of truth!—
Hadst thou my dreams!—O where is Paradise?—

EVE
Peace, peace, distracted soul!—

ADAM
No more! No more!—
No more the inviolable peace of God,
The tideless seas of bright beatitude
Spread like the aura of His steadfast soul!
No more the innocent communion
With Him whose voice pealed thro' the formless void
Till star by star the infinite creation
Woke like bright echoes on the vacant night!
No more the voice of cherubim that seemed
A pulse of light in the celestial dome!
No more, against the flashing slopes of heaven,
Seraphim poised on pinions blind with gold!—
Eden no more, the perfect glades no more!

EVE
I know full well there can be nevermore
The joy that was—to-morrow and to-day
Cannot be nourished with past happiness,
For past is past.—Not life alone is changed:
We are such men and women as we are,
Not as we were beneath God's tutelage,
When Paradise was a delicate play-garden
Where, in contentment of fair things, we lived
So childish-glad of his beneficence.
Now are we not withholden by God's grace
From all mortality; we know at last
How we are fashioned of the selfsame clay
Whence his creative hands divinely shaped
Behemoth and the bird of paradise.
On the bare uplands of reality
Our feet walk level with the whole of life!
Therefore the tender and impermanent joys,
The warm, frail happiness of mortal things
Are ours at last, our earned inheritance.

ADAM
They are not mine!—I know not what you mean!
I am one man to-day and yesterday:
I am that Adam of God's handiwork
Who, perfect thro' the paths of Paradise,
Walked hand in hand with happiness a while,—
Who now is haunted of shrill memories
And anxious dreams!

EVE
Adam—be resolute!
I too have dreamed, I too have memories
Of joy and violence and tragedy!
Your past is mine, we share to-day. Say this:
What was has never been, there yet can be
No less than is, nor more than is to come;
And life at last, at least is ours!

ADAM
Is life
This desolate sentience, this distressful toil,
This pain, this pitiful treasure of mean days?
Is life indeed this scant monotony
Of being,—this heart of violent agonies
And scared impermanent felicity,
This body of labor and lust and terrible tears,
This brain where everlasting memory beats
Dull as the pulse of a sick artery?
Then were it altogether a happy thing
If this magnificence of stainless light
Were quenched and night were set insuperable
Over this theatre of our desolation
And life so disinherited of delight
Abolished from this perishable dust!
If this be life what lovelier word befits
The clear and innocent ecstasies of Eden,
The candid rapture roused in body and soul
When dawn with lifted, fiery finger-tips
Kindled the dark and dreamless void of sleep,
And once again the vision of Paradise,
The endless melody of shallow waters,
Perfumes of foliage wet with silver light,
The sound of dewfall thro' the fragrant gloom
Of windless forests and the cries of birds
Scattered upon the spiritual silence
Like stars or dewdrops on the twilight—all
The miracle of God's sublime creation
Returned to consciousness!

EVE
Ask me no more!
Ask me no more!—such tears of mine are fallen
On the wild harp of memory that now
The strings are lax and faint,—they sing no more!
Well do I know the past was otherwise
And more—yet also haply something less!
Thought wearies of the eternal task!—at least
The austere and passionate life of liberty—

ADAM
Is strange to God's beneficent intent
And steadfast will!

EVE
Yet is it come to pass!—
The core of truth is darkness to the soul.
I cannot tell—I suffer of such things
As swell beyond the shape of any words.
Only in silence can we bear with fate,
And find the joy to live not pitiably
Nor infidel—lest all were lost in vain!

ADAM
In vain! In vain!—the word rings void as life!
In vain the irremediable woe,
In vain the exile from God's father-house,
In vain the lamentable days and nights
Of terrible remembrance and tense dreams!—
Vain hopes, vain tears, vain agonies!

EVE
Be still!
The dream has robbed thy soul of fortitude,
Swelled thy remorseful heart with futile tears,
And crazed thy brain with vain imaginings.
I know too well the face of thy despair,
Too well!—therefore be still that I may live!
I too have felt the intolerable scorn
And borne the task that seemed unbearable.

ADAM
The scorn of labour and the task of tears,
The scorn of memory and the task of life,
The scorn of hope, the task of patience—Eve,
I wait:—the end is silence. Look beyond!
Death even shall haply ease the exhausted flesh
And pour perpetual oblivion,
Shadow and senseless silence on the soul!

EVE
Shadow and silence and oblivion—
Is death indeed so absolute a term?
Is death a magic of such sovereign cure?
Is death a silence so eventual?
It cannot be! If life must find a term
Vain is the passionate utterance of life,
Vain the sore travail in which my womb conceived
The stalwart children of thy generation!
It cannot be! What tho' the hand of death
Shall smite my mouth with silence utterly
And feed spring flowers of my carrion?
Yet is eternity within me!—Hark!
Whispers, whispers of immortality!
As it were a shell found inland, so is life
Fulfilled with murmurs of an infinite sea!
Soul is the Pilgrim of Eternity,
And Life and Death in long processional
Chequer the pathways of its endless march
Like day and night: a strife and then a sleep,
Darkness and light, a song, a silence—so
They pass: the Pilgrim and the Path endure!
Adam! Adam!—I say thou canst as well
Measure the soul in terms of life and death
As lay a foot-rule to infinity!

ADAM
Be still! Here in the vigour of my days
I search the paths of time with sleepless eyes:
The void prospect of eternity
Glitters with ghosts of lunacy and fear!
My soul shudders!—I find no goal of light,
No guerdon of great deeds nor any hope
Save of the ambushed death that chokes with dust
The wolves of memory at the heels of life!
Death is the almshouse for the wayfarer,
The prize, the goal, the journey's end, the sleep!

EVE
Perchance—perchance—where's truth? the absolute
Is never learned yet faith is justified,
The faith of life that is and is to be.
Soul wanders blindly in a labyrinth,
Grasping for guidance one by one the threads,
Sombre or splendid, that at last combine
To weave the cosmic tapestry of truth.
Perfection lies beyond!—yet momently
Visions dawn, vistas of infinite light
Open—and close, yet leave their afterglow
To guide the wandering of the errant feet
Of the earth-children!

ADAM
Heart, O Heart of passion!
O Heart of tears!—canst thou console thy sorrow
With such vain raptures of imagination,
And make with fevers of a mind diseased
Roseate the unrelenting face of truth?
Thy faith is pitiful!

EVE
Not mine alone!—
I learn my secret from the lips of life:
Words of my gospel are bird-melodies,
Pale lotos ripening in the pond-waters,
The hollow murmur of the winds of spring
Thro' forests soft with imminent foliage,
Rose hyacinth and white anemone
And golden crocus, songs and perfumes shed
Thro' twilight, and the rush of plunging streams,
And sea-storms, and the native, violent lust
Of mating animals;—yea, from all acts of life
Transpire the faith, the measureless love, the clear
Simplicity of all heroic deeds!—
Sing, Spirit Divine! O lips of Life
Thrilled with immortal whispers, heart, O heart
Of Life, sing on!—my soul shall hear thy voice,
Shall sing thy song, O heart of Life! O lips
Of Life! and say—The crown, the prize, the pæan
Dull the magnificence of noble deeds!
Recompense is the measure of mean aims
And small achievements: toil may earn a wage
And strife a slumber, but the act of life,
Like all heroic deeds and spiritual,
Is wrought and tested in eternity!
Its parturitions prove too pure a faith
To ask a goal or seek a prize beyond!

ADAM
Poor Soul!—misery and sin have crazed thy brain!
Life is no other than a senseless lust:
What can the grosser nature signify?
Knowledge is God's alone; by His sole grace
We read the legend of unchanging truth:
Hope in His favour; for the rest, despair!

EVE
Hope in God's favour—hope of Paradise—
Hope of what was, of what no more shall be?

ADAM
—Lost, lost beyond recall!

EVE
—beyond recall!
Therefore not lost in vain! The soul inures
To new desires, new hopes, new powers, new truth!
O hope no more what was or what shall be!—
Lost is God's favour, lost is Paradise,
Lost the desire and hope of what has been,
And lost is even the blackness of despair
Whereof His wrath fulfilled me!

ADAM
Eve—

EVE
I say
We knew despair how dire an agony
It is, that night beneath the starless shroud
Of dark and thunder and whirlwind and shrill cries,
Whereunder earth seemed as a shattered ship
Derelict on the seas of dissolution!—

ADAM
When by his wrath was loosed against creation
The violence of elemental things!—
Woe beyond utterance!

EVE
Hear me!—suddenly
Forth from the pits of palpable blackness sprang
The dawn, and tore apart with hands of flame
Night's cere-cloth on its brows!—delirious,
Terrified, fallen,—free! I glimpsed again
The clear skies fresh and spiritual as song,
The life-beneficent and tender light,
The earth, this earth of graves and growing flowers!
Breathless and dumb, with eyes thirsty of vision,
I saw the impenetrable dome of night,
The walls of dark that seemed immutable,
Flicker to flame, while from their ruins fell
Embers of twilight thro' the storm-tossed airs!
And then, Adam, O then the gates of light—
Then, as I stared—sprang wide within me: Dawn
Broke in my soul! I was ineffably
Glad of unutterable things!—it seemed
Triumph was won, a miracle was wrought,
A deed of love and passionate liberty
Accomplished! Scornful of my night's despair,
Against the deep skies of eternity
The stars of life shone steadfast and the stars
Of faith,—the faith of life! And then, and then—
Sun rose resplendent, witness to the truth!
I knew in that surpassing hour, since day
And dark were faithful in their periods,
That life and death could not be less nor fail
Their full return!

ADAM
Then life's return is pain!—
For all my days are very lamentable,
And all my nights that should be smooth and void
Are fevered with intolerable visions,
And all my dreams of death are dark and dumb,
As of a peril and a mystery.
Yet am I nowise cringed before my woes!
Nay!—tho' my life is bruised with sore affliction
And dire repentance blasts my happiness,
Tho' in remembrance Paradise forever
Blooms with fresh light and flowers ineffable,
Clear pieties and peaceful innocence,
Against the gloom of this grieved sentience
Of violence and starvation, yet I bear,
Scornful of tears, the grief and scorn of life!
Faith is the stern, austere acknowledgment
And dumb obedience to the will of God:
Such faith my soul has kept inviolable!
What tho' He crush me, is He not the Lord!
Therefore my hands have torn the thrifty sod
And lured to fruitfulness the fragile seed.
I serve and wait; but nowise shall my soul
Yield to the lure of perishable joys
Nor scarf the eyes of Truth with gossamer
Of delicate hope, of fond imaginings.
Never within my heart shall cowardice
Whore with imagination to achieve
A false and unsubstantial happiness.
CAIN and ABEL enter unperceived from the tent.
I will be stern and just and absolute:
Thus only can the soul of man preserve
What shreds are left of calm and dignity.
Therefore, Woman, I say forbear thy speech!—
And Thou, O Lord of Life, Magnificent God,
Craftsman of miracles whose labour caused
Mighty establishment of heaven and earth,
Whose hands shaped chaos and tamed rebellious suns
And wrought the hosts of heaven to harmony,
Grooved perilous pitfalls for the unresting seas,
Lifted these naked uplands of the world,
Pillared on high the sapphire dome of heaven
And gave fair ordinance to the wayward hours—
Grant me, O God, to say—“Thy will be done!”
With level lips, obedient to the last!

CAIN
Father!—what say'st thou? Have I heard aright?
Obedient?

EVE
Cain!

ADAM
His will be done!

ABEL
Amen!

EVE
Cain! Cain!

CAIN
His will and mine and thine be done!—
Amen!—'t is well! His will and mine are twain,
Yet each may still be free and absolute.
Is my life less because you live? am I
Weak by your strength, by your hope hopeless? Nay!
A myriad lives cannot diminish me,
A myriad hearts distrain no love from mine,—
My will alone fashions my destinies!
Why say'st thou, then, obedient?—God is God,
And Man is Man.—Why chains when all is free?

ADAM
Thy dark thought stumbles in impiety.
Art thou so blinded from enlightenment?
God rules! knowest thou not His secret laws
Thro' life and death dispose immutably
The minnow and Leviathan, the pale
Glow-worm and Gold Arcturus with his sons?
Child, we are dust, once lifeless, soon to die,
Sentient and lonely creatures of his will
Cast in the mould of his divinity.

CAIN
Father! father!—What say'st thou?—Can it be
That we are creatures of an alien will,
The fashioned puppets of a craftsman's hands,
The structured dolls of God's imagining?
Creatures—How then?—is liberty a lie?
Are we so basely cheated and contemned?
Then are we pitiful spectres of a dream;
Then is this azure overarch of heaven
Lifted on ghostly wings of phantasy;
Then is the day-spring's fire-flushed flood that pours
Up the star-shingled beaches of the sky
A bright delusion; then beneath the sun
Are void phantoms; then is life itself,
This passionate life, this imminent creation,
Mere vapour on the immeasurable heaven
Where dawns the eternal morning of the soul!
Nay!—since we are not men but slaves, and thus
Even the high task and ecstasy of love,
The austere endurance of great wrongs are vain,
And vain all tenderness and sacrifice
That swell the soul's horizons,—then the Soul
Itself is naught—a cause denies the Soul!
O father, seest thou not how much is lost?
How by God's will all fades to nothingness?
What cause is needed why the splendid sun,
The delicate moon and all the faultless stars
Minister to the world delicious light?
What cause is needed why the crusted sod
Gives punctual utterance to so fragile flowers?
What cause is needed why within me stirs
The haughty power and longing of creation,
Or thought or spiritual serenity?
What cause is needed, what is justified?
If cause there be then are we all betrayed,
Then may we well despair of life and death!

ADAM
I hear thy words—madness and blasphemy!
God pity me!—for I thought his justice slept,
His vengeance drowsed, with misery satiated.
I was the more deceived!—The poison works:
Thou art the child of Woman, the son of sin.
Thy crazed words witness:—Eve, thy womb is cursed,
Hark to thy son!

EVE
In a low voice
Mine! Mine!

ADAM
Methinks I hear
That voice that said, “Thou shalt be even as is
Almighty God, knowing both Good and Evil!”

EVE
That voice of passionate poems and grave joys—
Even so—

ADAM
It spake as thou, my eldest son!

CAIN
What have I uttered more or less than truth?
Why are your words so strange, your eyes so sad,
And sudden panic fallen upon your thoughts?—
For love, for justice, simply, as I speak,
Deal with me! Judge me not, tho' ignorance
Cheats my impetuous soul:—are we not all
Like lonely voyagers on uncharted seas
Who signal each to each when thro' the gloom
Flashes a beacon, or a distant roar
Warns where some coast confronts the sombre flood,
Perchance the haven of our guideless quest,
Perchance a peril and a sepulchre?
O you, forbear!—even tho', lost and blind,
I, from the sluggish rear of circumstance,
Signal a rushlight for a guiding star
To you who lead the intrepid van of hope,
Let not your hearts condemn me utterly!
Whatever leagues divide us man from man
Seem in the endless journey of the soul
So brief a distance! Rather, tenderly,
Lead me to stand one day where now you stand,
To glimpse the light that proves me wrong to-day!

ADAM
The light is God! Within the soul there dwells
Reflected splendour!—He, the Sun of Heaven,
Gives light to all. The dream of liberty
Shadows the glass, where God's magnificence
Alone should glow, with darkness utterly.
When, from the sapphire pinnacles of heaven,
Spangled with stars, where sing to pleasure Him
Grave angels and the clear-voiced Sons of Song,
His eyes look forth, we seem as flickering motes
Caught in the stream of his effulgence!

CAIN
Nay!
No height whence the supernal vision falls
Can shrink us to a less reality
Than what we are, being no less than men!

EVE
Spirit of Life! Thrilled Heart!—Nay, words are vain!
The worst shall come inevitably I know.
My heart is keen with direful prophecy—
Cain, Cain, my heart aches of your destinies!
Clasp me, dear son, in both your arms!—O God!
What shall I say?

CAIN
I ask no eminence,
No power, no more than truth!—in very deed
What less thing can a man desire than truth?

EVE
What more thing?

ADAM
Since the truth is God!

CAIN
The truth
Is mine and yours in measure of our will!

ABEL
Yours?—Mine?

CAIN
How not, if there is truth at all?
The ways are barred to no adventurer,
The seas bear up whatever onward keel!

ABEL
Where? To what end? Lacking God's guidance, where
Shall stray such blind and errant enterprise?

CAIN
Haply thro' all sweet vistas and sublime
The ecstatic soul at last goes home to light!

ABEL
But you?

CAIN
I walk level with what I am,
Negligent of a goal. My feet no less
Are stablished where they tread than spreads my soul
Her irised wings and lifts her breast of faith
Against the eternal skies and shoreless seas,
The infinite, fresh, immortal, strange Beyond!
So poised, I may be master of no thing
That is at all and will be slave to none!
If God—you say—assume to tutor me,
How shall He ask a less thing than I crave
In native aspiration? Rather shall He
Lift up his light beyond the utmost stars
Fading along the verge of consciousness!
Rather than bind me in obedience
He shall loose freedom from the parapets
Of heaven and spur my soul to range beyond!
So, haply, after long discoveries,
To walk at last as comrade, hand in hand,
And share with Him the infinite vision of truth!

ADAM
O mortal pride! O madness worse than sin!
Pitiful child! Derisive, trifling worm
God's foot would crush didst thou deserve so much,—
Be silent! lest perchance thy noisy babble
Might vex his calm divinity!—

EVE
Hush!—Hush!
I know the worst must come—nothing avails,
For him my heart foretold catastrophe
When, as I watched last night beside his sleep,
His brows grew bent in great resolve, his lips
Muttered as tho' within his sightless eyes
Sate perilous visions or his soul endured
Strange visitation of fantastic dreams!
Cain!—O my child, I love you utterly!
What urge compels you? What magnificence
Lifts in your life? What sense of combat swells
Your soul with truth, your heart with liberty?

CAIN
How shall I say?—within me all is flowing
And vague and boundless and unutterable.
Within me joy, heart-deep, heart-warm, and love
And power of life are measureless; within
Light beats and swells!—I dwell within the soul's
Rose-irised mist of everlasting wonder
Where life assails me with resistless love!
I share with all—and all results for me!
For me the day-spring and the dawn of moon,
For me the elate, innumerable stars,
For me strong seas, for me this earth of graves—
O earth of tireless conception!—and
For me these plains and desolate mountain-peaks,
This glad and faithful fellowship of life!
These all, all are my passionate lovers! All
They seize my sense, they take their will of me,
They task me with delicious ecstasies!
On towers of naked rock, in deep defiles,
Beneath the glittter of tree-leaves wet with light,
By streams singing their journey thro' the world,
In rainfall, by the roar of distant seas
On beach and cliff, by cloud and cataract,
I feel a presence and a mystery,
A summons of incomparable love,
Great indications of eternity,
Miracles, vistas, portents, lifted veils,
Breathless discoveries and revelations,
The lure of open arms, thro' doors ajar
Glimpses beyond, voices of grave surmise,—
These, all I feel within me and around,
Breathe of immortal secrets!—More, too deep,
Too delicate for words, heaves in my breast,
Burns in my sense and swells my soul with light!

EVE
O God, how all my wounded heart resounds!
Hush, lest I yield!—No more!—No more!—thy words
Are wonderful and strange as happiness!
The gates spring wide asunder!—Hush! No more!
Thy dreams, God knows, were otherwise,—thy dreams
Were gaunt with pride and prophecy and pain!

CAIN
Then were my dreams beyond my conscious scope.
The spread of earth, the circling deeps of heaven,
The interminable sea, resistless love,
The passion and miracle of life and death,
The immortal whispers from within the soul—
My knowledge finds horizon in these things.

ADAM
So far, so pitiably art thou strayed from truth,
Thou blind and boastful fool! learn this at least:
The true horizon of the soul is God!
And thou, Eve, Woman, most perilously wandered
In weak delusion, now I charge thee speak,
Lest thou should'st fall again in deathless sin,
Of God and man,—God's all, man's nothingness!

EVE
Dear son, we are God's creatures every one—

CAIN
Mother!

EVE
I'll speak no more!

ABEL
Haply it is
That God inspires his handiwork and sets
The pulse of life in cadence with his heart.
Haply, dear Cain, the joy, the infinite love,
The fire and perfume of divinity,
The rapture of concealed infinities
Thy soul has garnered round thee and within,
Are but the harvest of his seed of grace
Sown broadcast over all his huge creation.

CAIN
Then am I cheated of my heritage!
Then all's a dream, a web of foolish lies!
Then is the faith that fills the fragile nest
And exquisitely brings frail flowers to bud
A pitiful derision; then is life
A monstrous farce and death a fruitless pang!
Then are my manhood and my liberty,
My will, my thoughts, the life-sap of my loins,
The unborn sons and daughters of my blood
Vain hopes and pitiable deceptions, lies
Of sense and soul,—Aye! then is God himself
The showman of a stupid mummery—

EVE
Cain!—Cain!—forbear!

CAIN
Hast thou forgot thy pangs
That prove this life was thine that now is mine?
Not God's life, thine and mine!—Yea! face to face
And heart to heart, with deep and fearless eyes,
So it is mete that I should speak with God
Who speak with no thing on less perfect terms!
My life, my love, my cherished liberty,
Are mine because whatever is at all
Shares in their dispensation.—I will take
No joy but all participate, no pang
But all endure, no power, no attribute
But all possess or shall possess in turn!
So is my right inviolable to stand
Where now I stand and ask my leave of none!

ADAM
Enough!—O God, be just yet merciful!
Witless he is and sinful—yet my son!
Punish his sin, yet I beseech thee stay
The full and righteous measure of thy wrath!
And thou—answer no more!—I'll hear no more!
Thou art my son, living in God's defiance,
To add a grief more grievous than the rest
To all the misery my harsh days must bear!
And thou, whose weakness set the term to joy,
Thou, by whose sin the worst has come to pass,
Beware of what more dire events may chance!
And now—Go forth each one. The daylight lifts—
Somewhere your labour waits you in the world!

ACT II

GENESIS

CHAPTER IV

[OMITTED]

3. And in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.

4. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering;

5. But unto Cain and to this offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

6. And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?

7. If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. ...

8. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

A broad level of naked rock at the extreme summit of a high mountain. No vegetation nor any sign of life whatever. At the back the mountain falls away in a sheer precipice. In the immense distance below and beyond stretches a vast panorama of forest, field and stream, warm and tranquil thro' the golden haze of late afternoon. In the foreground is a low platform of stone about twenty feet square with three broad stone steps leading up to it. On the platform stands a sort of sacrificial stone or table of offerings. The splendid light of the low sun inundates the summit of the mountain and lies, windless and warm, across the altar.

Time: late afternoon of the same day which dawned in Act I.

CAIN enters by a path ascending from the valley. He bears in his hands fruit, grain, and two small jars containing oil and wine. He places his burden on the ground near the raised platform, and, seating himself on a boulder, surveys the immense prospect spread beneath him.

CAIN
I am gone sky-ward to the uttermost—
Tacit and distant as life's thought of death
Earth lies beneath me patterned with sheer hills,
Deserts and forest-marches, flashing streams
And sea-scapes vast beyond the power of vision.
Its charted levels, whelmed beneath the dumb
Cycles and tides of lucent sapphire, seem
A sea-floor tufted with gigantic weeds,
Virgin of tumult or the tread and travel
Of restless feet; yet fruitful streams, I know,
Go seaward voiced with endless melody,
Twilight is plaintive with the cries of birds,
Dim forests murmur soft as sleep, and all
The myriads of life are musical!
No whisper lifts,—the light is deep and dumb.
As one sequestered in the tower of thought
I stand aloof from restless strife and sound,
Withdrawn beyond the fellowship of life.
Solitude, silence and tranquillity,
Immensity of elemental things,—
Haply in you at last the soul finds room,
And liberty and light haply in you!
It may be,—aging with the passionate seasons
On earth's maternal breast,—that life becomes
Too much a lyric enterprise, too wrought
With dreams and great desires and deep surmise,
Too dazed with motion and magnificence.
There, in the press and pride and longing of life,
Haply the captive soul is leashed and lulled;
Yet whiles, even in the ruck of the swift hours,
Sentient of twilights and infinities!
But here is refuge: silence, unperturbed,
Broods on these battlements of lifeless stone
Reared like an isle from life's tempestuous sea.
Regioned in light and loneliness, the soul
May, in the all-reflecting glass of truth,
Confront with eyes insatiable of light
The revelations of eternity.
Here might at last divinely be fulfilled
All spiritual indications to the soul
From rapt communion with the silent stars,
That still by night their endless vigil keep
On the vague frontiers of infinity.
Here might the thought of time, the thought of death,
The wonder and desire of deathless things
Yield to the soul their last significance.
Here might the mystery of God be solved!
He pauses, staring before him over the immense prospect where the light deepens.
I know at last all shall be lived, endured—
All shall at last find mansions in the soul;
And then—then shall the soul be satisfied?
O restless voyager, where is thy rest?
Is there a haven for thine enterprise,
A goal for thine adventure and a term
For thine infinity?—Imagination,
Daring the intervals of pathless gloom
From star to star of thought, falls broken-winged!
Yet are the days of life occasional
Of truth's divine discovery,—and soul
Shall at the last accept no less than truth!

A pause. CAIN gazes before him, lost in thought. Then, ascending from below, the voice of Abel is heard singing.
The voice of ABEL

ABEL, bearing in his arms a lamb, enters and appears face to face with CAIN.
CAIN
Abel—Abel—

ABEL
Cain—

CAIN
Abel—alone—
So far—

ABEL
My feet have striven to this sheer height
Led by the luminous spirit of piety;
I bear the innocent firstling of my flocks
Here to God's altar as a thanksgiving
Of all my heart for his beneficence!
My mood perchance is thine: creation stirs
To new conception; earth's reviving green
Moves the meek heart to praise the Lord of Life
With songs and seasonable sacrifice.

CAIN
Thy mood is alien to my thoughts of God
And all my visions of human destiny.
I bring no tribute—

ABEL
Nay!—a eucharist!
Is it not very spacious and most fair
This parcel of God's potent handiwork
Held by the sons of man in heritage?
Is it not generous of all pleasantness
And fruitful for the hunger of life's days?
Then, to the Heavenly Artisan who severed
Darkness from light, shaped systems from the void,
Wafted the breath of life thro' lifeless clay,—
How else to Him can man glance heavenward
Save with mild eyes of adoration? How
Climb to his footstool save in grateful praise?

CAIN
God knows no gratitude of mine shall fail
Where such is due. God knows when face to face
I meet my creditor, no debt he proves
Shall wait for payment. Now, till then, I stand
Fettered by no more than my bounds of thought,
Slave to such fears and passions as obscure
Soul's truth and chill the headlong heart of faith,—
Yet, in conception, strong, supreme, and free!

ABEL
Why has this violence of self, this stern
Defiance diseased thy soul with doubt and pride?
The days of life bring one by one their treasure
Of simple toil and simple happiness—
Desires, right deeds, endurance, joy and pain,
With over all the shelter of God's wise will!
Forego thy search: God is a mystery.
Now, while the last light lingers heavenward,
Let me fulfill my sacrifice: my soul
Lies on God's breast,—my trust is all in Him.

ABEL ascends the steps to the raised platform, still carrying the lamb in his arms. He sets the lamb down and heaps some fuel on the sacrificial stone. Then he stands before it facing the deep light of sunset.
CAIN
to himself as he watches Abel
His face is young and tranquil as a child's:
All seems surpassing well with him,—his eyes
Shine with calm rapture, innocent of thought.
Meek trust, simplicity and tenderness—
I must believe his soul is satisfied,—
Filled with a crust!—and I who starve, who starve!
O tireless voyager! O soul of me!
Captain, my soul!—shall we not better rest?
See, where a mansion in the House of Life
Waits our repentance, and a candle burns
Still thro' the casement—yea, tho' faint and far,
The firelight of contentment lures us back!
Shall we not better pause, return,—forget
Our desperate quest beyond the heedless stars?
Shall we not better live forevermore
Passionless by the threshold, lulled in sleep,
Like children sheltered in the Father-house?

ABEL
The golden sandals of reluctant day
Climb the broad shoulders of the heavenward hills.
Earth fills with darkness like a shallow bowl
And sleep weighs down the weary lids of life.
O peace of God, vigil of God's great love,
I feel you now, in vast serenity,
Brood like a benediction on the world!

CAIN
still to himself
No more the ecstasy and the pangs of thought,
No more the tempest's threat, the perilous plunge
And shoreless vision of blind uncharted seas
Where soul must wander years and lives and æons
Seeking the undiscoverable truth!
Captain, my soul,—shall we not better rest?

ABEL strikes fire and lights the fuel upon the altar. He throws on the flames myrrh and frankincense; a dense smoke arises. Then he raises the lamb in his arms and at the same moment draws a knife from his belt.
ABEL
Being whose thoughts are destiny: whose power
Chains the rebellious, tames the passionate;
Whose justice spares the suppliant soul and damns
The soul of pride,—Almighty God, to Thee
Ascend my pæan and prayer and thanksgiving!
Father of Life, accept thy creature; Lord,
Master, receive thy faithful servant Abel!
I ask with contrite heart and will subdued
The dispensation of thy charity!
Suffer this fire and incense may be blessed;
This living sacrifice be sanctified
With thine acceptance!
ABEL cuts the throat of the lamb and lets the warm blood pour out on the sacrificial stone.
I beseech Thee guard
My frailty, fill my heart with thy desire,
Fashion my will to thine intention, take
Temptation from me of my mortal strength,
And pride of thought,—my hope is all in Thee!

ABEL falls on his knees beside the altar and remains lost in rapture. CAIN springs to his feet.
CAIN
Shine! Shine! passionate light of Liberty!
Blow outward winds! lift the wide wings of thought
Reckless and blind against the night! and you,
Monotonous thunder of the shoreless seas,
Sound thro' long vistas to the sleepless soul!
Rouse, heart benumbed, the lethargy is passed!
Spirit dismayed, the spell is shattered, wake!
Athlete of Freedom, rend the silken fetters
That well-nigh bound thy nerveless sinews fast!
O Heart, how near we stooped to infamy!
Now and forever the supreme choice is made,
The die is cast! Never shall I behold,
Turning a backward glance from truth's endeavour,
The firelight of content, the lamp of fear
Flickering behind the clouded panes of thought,
The guarded threshold of the House of Sleep!
Forward I set my steadfast eyes! Haste! haste!
Captain, my soul! we shall return no more!
Cut the last strands of weakness and despair
That bound our vessel to the shores of safety!
I hear the singing of all the spacious seas
Of truth's supreme adventure and at last
Take the deep vistas with a homeless eye!
CAIN advances rapidly, seizes the grain, wine and oil which he had deposited on the ground and mounts the steps to the platform. There he pauses a moment, looking down upon ABEL, who is still on his knees in a sort of quiet ecstasy.
Man! and so abject! yet my heart is love—
So young he seems, so tender like a child!
Abel!

ABEL
Who calls me?

CAIN
Rise! for I am Cain,
First of the Sons of Man!

ABEL
O rouse me not!
God's peace enfolds me—

CAIN
Rise!

ABEL
What is thy will?

ABEL rises to his feet still a little dazed by the rapture of his meditations.
CAIN
Knowest thou me?

ABEL
Why are thine eyes so strange?

CAIN
Knowest thou me?

ABEL
Thou art my brother Cain—

CAIN
First of the sons of man!

ABEL
What is thy will?

CAIN
Abel, as we are men, I love thee!

ABEL
Cain,
As God is Love, I love thee.

CAIN
All my will
Is thy redemption—

ABEL
My redemption?

CAIN
Man!
I will redeem thee from thine abject state,
Strike the vile fetters from thy fearful feet,
And set thee in the path of liberty!

ABEL
Liberty?

CAIN
I have lifted the large light,
Near to destruction; it shall shine as fire
Flashing by night, and there where nothing was
Save darkness where imagined spectres stalked,
Visions of God and man's divinity,
Grown to perfection thro' ascending lives,
Shall smite thy breathless soul with wonder!

ABEL
Cain!

CAIN
Liberty!—See!—God stands before thee now
Real and majestic! Thou shalt understand
How much thy cowardice has wronged him; Man,
Thou hast defiled his name! Thy prayers invoke
Some wrathful demon, not the Soul of Light!
Repent thy prayers, thy prayers were blasphemy!

ABEL
Cain!

CAIN
Hear me—

ABEL
Blasphemy?

CAIN
God is not Lord
Of slaves nor tyrant pleased with abject fears,
Pæans and sacrifice: God sheds his grace
And shares his fellowship for men, not slaves!
Men who are sinewed with sublime resolve,
Whom perfect faith has made insatiable,
Whose eyes pursue, star over star, the last
Outpost of knowledge in the skies of thought!
Pilgrims of pathless lands, whom neither walls
Nor slumber nor the arms of love can hold;
Mariners who depart on shoreless seas
Avid of new horizons in the vast
Unknown!—O men, homeless and lonely men,
For you, for you the fellowship of God!

ABEL
Thine is the blasphemy! Beware! The Lord
Hath said, “Vengeance is mine!”

CAIN
Thy words are wild.
Vengeance? Why vengeance? Shall I dare to fear
The Truth?—O man! are we not torch-bearers?

ABEL
Beware! we are but men and God is God!

CAIN
What then? Divinity is here, not there!
O Soul, God is not otherwise than thou.
And thou art God, O soul, spirit divine!
Words that defile nor body nor soul of me
Defile not God! He is what I shall be,
I am what he has been! Hours, days, years,
Centuries, cycles, æons,—I shall pass
At last to where he waits and longs for me!

CAIN strides to the altar and pours on the failing fire his oil and wine. At once the fire flames brightly and a dense column of smoke mounts straight into the windless air. Then CAIN scatters his grain upon the altar. Meanwhile ABEL, dazed and scared, shrinks farther and farther away toward the steps.
CAIN
To You, Spirit Divine! O Soul of Life,
Denizen of this tenement! O God,
Captain of life's adventure, Self and Soul,
Immortal Master of this mortal house!
To You, for moments of eternity;
To You, for Truth's sublime discoveries;
To You, for revelations still to come,
Visions unseen, unknown infinities,—
To You this invocation and to You
This ecstasy and solemn sacrifice!

CAIN stands, transported with rapture, his face lifted and flushed with the firelight. Suddenly darkness falls, thunder peals, there comes a violent gust of wind, and

---

281

the column of smoke from CAIN'S sacrifice is bent and blown straight back in his face. He recoils a step.
The voice of GOD
Rejected!

ABEL shrieks and stumbles backward down the steps of the platform. At the bottom he falls on his knees and bows his head to the ground.
ABEL
Grace!—Forgiveness!—Mercy!—Mercy!

CAIN
Give me breath!—I am stunned!

The voice of GOD
Rejected!

ABEL
God! O God!
My God!—be merciful! be merciful!

CAIN
Who cries, “Rejected?”

ABEL
God!

The Voice of GOD
Rejected!

CAIN
Speak!
Answer!—Who dares reject the soul of Cain?
I am the Son of Man—who dares reject me?

ABEL
Cain—Cain!

CAIN
Who dares reject me?

The Voice of GOD
I am God!
Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?
If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?
And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door!

Immediately the wind falls, the sudden darkness lifts, disclosing ABEL prostrate on the ground at the foot of the steps leading to the platform, and CAIN standing, erect and menacing, by the sacrificial stone. Below, the immense panorama of the earth is covered with the shadows of early night. The fire on the altar is extinguished and the scene is illumined only by the last dark flush of sunset which still lingers on the summit

---

283

of the mountain. The deep violet of the skies is spangled with ripe stars. The silence and the stillness are unbroken.
CAIN
God's voice!—Rejected!—Cain, the Son of Man,
Rejected!—Man, rejected and man's soul
Utterly lost from God's acceptance!—Then—
Hope whored with Fancy and begot a—dream!
So was my soul deceived!—Rejected!—Hear me,
Infinite, voiceless, elemental airs,
Pathless, inviolable firmament!
Hear me, ethereal solitudes, untrod
Save by the bare and soundless feet of light!
Hear me, O cosmic fellowship of stars,
Stainless as children's eyes; majestic suns
And far-flung systems of coherent orbs!
Hear me, O sun, creative lord of light!
Hear me, O moon, mistress of chaunting tides!
Hear me, dead snows of desolate mountain-peaks,
Robing the tragic shapes of cliff and crag!
Hear me, resistless sea and fruitful earth,
Theatre of life and death!—O earth and sea
Of graves and resurrections, toil and sleep!
Hear me, O Heart, O passionate Heart of Life!
Hear me, Immortal Heart! And hear me, you,
All in whose veins the pulse of life abounds!
And you, Abel! Abel!—O Son of Man,
Hear me! Hear me! Hear me!—now and forever
I make you witness to this monstrous deed—
God has rejected Cain, the Son of Man!

ABEL
God of stern justice and resistless wrath!

CAIN
Justice?—No justice moves this fierce revenge!

ABEL
God's will is justice!—Desperate rebel, yield!
Hast thou not suffered of all thy sinful pride?
Shall not the power of God constrain thy heart?
Measure thy peril,—be contrite or despair!

CAIN
Never! I will not yield nor yet despair!
Must we despair?—Respond, rejected Soul!
Faith cheated, love deceived, fond hopes betrayed,
By God denied—must we despair? Respond!
Where's justice?—light?—refuge?—Thought reels! The rod
Strikes fire from flint—beneath the blows of wrath
Fierce doubts and perilous questions leap like sparks,
Flashing within me! Reckless Soul, respond!
Who is the God who dares reject me? Who
Art thou, Spirit Divine?

ABEL
Repent! Repent!
Lest worse befall thee!

CAIN
God rejects me!—Now,
As one who falls in fight and then at dawn
Wakes on the stricken field as life returns
Spent and delirious from the peril of death,
And so, nerved with faint hope, numbers his wounds,—
So I, from fear and dire amazement roused,
Question my peril and count my injuries:
How have I suffered? Where have I suffered? Speak!
Body and soul seem scatheless—life remains—
Where are my wounds?—I feel them not! My strength
Is whole! Where are my wounds? Where are my wounds?
I swear, I swear nothing is lost!—All's well!
Captain, my soul, despair is not for thee!
Thou shalt behold the seals of darkness lift,
Weather the wrathful tempest and at last,
Resolute, onward, headlong, dazed and scarred,
Reel thro' the gates of Truth's enormous dawn!

ABEL
Madman! Beware!—Thy hope is weaved of dreams;
Damnable dreams to cheat the will of God;
Pitiful dreams, proud dreams, fantastic lies!

CAIN
Abel!

ABEL
Repent!—if still repentance serves,
Repent!—the mercy of God is infinite
To all who bring his favoured sacrifice—
A contrite, humble and obedient heart!

CAIN
Truth, not forgiveness, I demand of God,
Justice, not mercy, love, not charity!
I was not fashioned to bewail my sins,
I was not born for safe obedience!
I bring not peace among you but a sword!

ABEL
Cain—for thy life's sake, Cain, repent!

CAIN
No more!
Silence!—Ask me no more!—I feel at last
The breath of light, frail and portentous!—Wake!
It dawns, rejected Soul!—The secret yields!
I have been stunned! And now—Light!—Now, suddenly
Shadows shall fade, veils lift—I shall discover
One of the meanings!—Now—at last, at last,
I understand!—Creation—Paradise—
The immortal fruit—Mother, thy gorgeous deed!
O revelations! O discoveries!
Measureless light at last! The truth at last!
Enlightenment!—All's well! The sacred fire
Of liberty still burns!—Man is redeemed!

ABEL
Lost! Lost! Utterly lost, body and soul!
Accursed! Accursed!

CAIN
Now God's dominion ends!

ABEL
Accursed! Accursed!

CAIN
Now man's abasement ends!
For now the power and wrath and terrour of God
Fade like false phantoms in the light,—the light!
God is dethroned and man resumes the crown,
Regains the sceptre of divinity!

ABEL
Pitiful madman!

CAIN
Peace!—despair and fear
Are ghosts that haunt the night of ignorance;
Dwellers in darkness of the immense unknown;
Phantoms that lurk where thought's horizons blur,
Where the vague shores of knowledge quake to feel
Tumult and thunder of the seas beyond!

ABEL
Merciful God, pity him—he is mad!
Pity and spare him!

CAIN
Peace!—God's power is lost!
The ghastly tyranny of fear no more
Shall bind the spirit of man in servitude!
How can our faith be less than perfect now?
All that awaits us shall be well, as all
That is and has been in surpassing well!
Measure thy scope and grasp thy heritage,
Captain, my Soul!—Perchance not God alone
Shall fade and vanish as the large light expands.
It may be, haply, that at last in thine
Infinite waking life itself shall prove
A passionate dream and death a tranquil sleep!

ABEL
Silence, distracted soul!—Can God condone
When I condemn thee as I must? Thou sayest
Such frantic words of peril and deadly sin
As no conception of my brain can grasp
Nor all my love forgive!

CAIN
O man, rejoice!
Now thou shalt understand—at last, at last,
All shall be clear and steadfast in thy soul.
Purge from thy brain the sickness of strange fears:
My cause is pregnant of new liberties:
Hear me in peace and be my justicer.
How I have thought ineffably of God
And stretched the vistas of all my hopes to him,
God knows and thy remembrance certifies.
Much I believed that Truth's immortal seed,
Lost or unfruitful in the soul of man,
Was, in the spirit of God, by love and light,
Brought to its perfect flower—infinity.
God was to me a star of quenchless rays
Guiding my soul thro' time from life to life,
Training my vision to glimpse eternity!
God was to me the breast where all may weep,
The eyes where all may find the immortal light,
The hand that all may clasp, the heart of hearts,
The spirit of passionate faith and liberty,—
The tenant of the heavenly father-house,
Waiting with arms of welcome wide for all!
Such were my visions, such were my thoughts of God—
Yet God rejects me! See! the monstrous deed
Aches for interpretation. What is God,
God who rejects so pure an ecstasy?
Witness!—the crucial secret must be solved!
Spirit finds answer—thou shalt hear and learn,
Partner in man's inheritance with man.
God who rejects me and betrays my hope;
God who denies me and deceives my faith,
Cheats my desire and scorns my exalted love;
God, who with peace and pleasure and loveliness,
Fashioned the marvellous gardens of Paradise,
Sating man's senses to debauch his soul;
God, whose despair,—when Eve, with sacred thirst,
Gathered and shared the fruit whereof all men
Must eat who seek the soul's enlightenment,—
Drew from his lips the cry: “Behold the man
Is even as God, knowing both good and evil!”
God, who in passion and fear and frenzy smote
Man's disobedience and his dignity;
God, who would hold the heart enslaved with fear,
Stifle the sacred fire with ignorance,
Leash the proud soul with duty and content,
Obedience and remorseful cowardice,—
God is not liberty but law, not love
But mercy, not redemption but despair;
Not joy but lethargy and meek content,
Not grief's robust acknowledgment of wrong
But abject lamentation and remorse,
Not justice but forgiveness or revenge,
Not strength but safety, not the change of growth,
Fluid unrest of free development,
But rules and customs and establishments,
Limits and lies—the servitude of man!
So even is God and God's significance!
But Lo! at last man wakes and stands and strives!
Liberty!—Light!—Thy deed was not in vain,
Mother! Thy womb has not engendered slaves!

ABEL, still on his knees, has listened to CAIN with steadily growing terrour. By this time his fear and amazement, his conviction of Cain's utter lunacy, have become, as it were, a shield which neither the shafts of persuasion nor reason nor truth can penetrate. He is, in a word, panic-stricken. Staring at CAIN, he backs away from him on his knees.
ABEL
almost in whisper
Blasphemy!

CAIN
By the breast that gave thee suck,
Abel, my brother, I adjure thee rise!
Rise and rejoice! I bring thee liberty;
For truth is liberty and nought but truth!
Never again thy knees shall cringe; thy heart
Never again shall feel the fear of God!
Body and Soul are real and perfect—rise!

ABEL
as before
Blasphemy!

CAIN
Lo! men are we—Gods in germ!
The earth is real, steadfast beneath our feet,
The spacious vision of light is in our eyes,
And over us the dark void is fathomless.
Under the skies' pavilion, gemmed with stars,
On earth's exhaustless breast the flesh can feel
The chill and challenge and mystic hush of dawn,
The careless largess of the luminous days,
The vast of night, the fragrant shadows of sleep,
The task, the triumph, the constant truth of life,
And death's eventual tranquillity!
Yea, even when flesh dissolves in final change
Still may it feel the growth of flowers and still
Serve the insatiable desire of life!
While Soul with passionless and immortal eyes,
Sleepless and strained to glimpse eternity,
Thro' endless time, ascending avatars,
Keeps way and vista to the throne of God
And thence beyond to new infinities!
Finding no goal it shall not reach and pass
And no supremacy it may not share!
Rise! rise!—Ours is the choice, be ours the will!
Body and soul we cannot be denied!

ABEL
as before
So spake the serpent in the golden glades,
So spake the Demon in the ears of Eve—
Blasphemy!
To CAIN
Ask me no more! I'll hear no more!

CAIN
Abel!

ABEL
Be still, lest God should strike thee dumb!

CAIN
Abel!

ABEL
Silence! No more! My heart is sick,
My brain withers!—O God!—Delirious fool,
Dost thou not know that should my soul forget
The fear, the power, the sovereignty of God,
Then would the mercy of God, the might of God
Shelter and guide and comfort me no more?

CAIN
Abel!—art thou so blind, so abject? Man,
Truth is thy guide, thy light is liberty!
What need of shelter where no harm impends?
What need of comfort where no fears assail?
Safety alone is perilous and fear
Only is fearful!

ABEL
So was Eve destroyed!

CAIN
It cannot be thou art so pitiable—
It cannot be!

ABEL
So was perfection lost!

CAIN
It cannot be!—Wake from thy trance! the flood
Of light shall whelm thee suddenly; Truth shall rise,
Strange as a distant land-fall made at dawn,
Pure and transcendent in thy darkened ken!
Where's the disaster, where's the ruinous loss,
The peril thy scared imagination fears?
Speak!

ABEL
Art thou mad? If God's protection fails
Where is security and rest and peace?
Lacking God's grace what more is left for man
Than misery, want, alarm, and loneliness?
Always the outcast from the favour of God
Must feel the agony of a ceaseless dread
Of life and death consume his happiness.
I shudder in the mere thought!

CAIN
It cannot be!
Turn from thy cowardice and childish fears!
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it;
But whosoever shall lose his life for truth
And liberty, the same shall save his life!
What shall it profit thee if thy life is gained
And all the splendour of all the world beside
If soul is lost? What shall it profit thee
To live sheltered in comfort and content,
If thou must yield the soul's inheritance
To alien government and forego thy crown,
Forfeit thy power and pawn thy liberty?
Nothing without can harm or comfort thee;
Peril and joy come only from within!
Thine is the venture!—seek and thou shalt find,
Clasped in the soul's horizons, life and death,
Divinity and power and destiny;
For in thyself superb attainment lies,
Fair in the paths of hope, the range of faith!
Thou art the way, thou art the wayfarer,
Thou art the guide, the goal, the pilgrimage!
Seeking and finding in itself alone,
Thy soul must bear the labour and tears of life,
And feel the passion and gain the glory of love,
And find the eternal thought, the perfect faith,
The courage of truth's unconquerable hope!
All that we know to-day is ours to-day,
And all unknown to-morrow shall be ours!

ABEL
Better that I should leave thee! I can bear
No more! My brain shudders to hear thee speak,
As God shakes in his wrath, knowing thy soul!
Better that I should leave thee—veil on veil,
Darkness is fallen between us utterly:
Now are we strangers who were joined in love!
Better that I should leave thee!—Go thy ways;
Gather the harvest that thy sins have sown!
I can endure no more!

CAIN
A heart so tame,
A brain so chilled with fear, such vile disgrace,
Sorts with the bastard of a soulless slave,
Not with an offspring from the womb of Eve!
O man!—Abel!

ABEL
I'll hear no more—

He turns away.
CAIN
The truth
Shines like a watch-fire and thou wilt not see;
Sounds like a clarion and thou wilt not hear!
Why art thou deaf and blind?

ABEL
I'll stay no more!

He takes a step as tho' to depart.
CAIN
What, must I teach at last these lips of mine
Kissed by thy lips so oft, to call thee slave,
Coward and traitor?—Child of Eve's rebellion,
Abel, art thou a man?

ABEL
turning upon him fiercely
A man I am,
Of God's creation and the child of God!
Much have I heard thy madness rave and rant,
Long have I borne thy blasphemies,—but now,
Better that I should leave thee!

He turns resolutely to depart.
CAIN
Abel! Abel!
Abel!—Thou wearest the semblance of a man,—
The speech, the form, the function!—Leave me? Thou?
Knowest thou me?—I am thy brother, Cain!
How canst thou leave me?—Paradise was lost
That we might live and reap the harvest of life!
How canst thou leave me while the selfsame blood
Throbs in our hearts and thrills our limbs with strength?
Are we not men together, you and I?
Are we not men?

ABEL
As God is God!—Farewell!

Again ABEL takes a step to depart.
CAIN
Abel!

ABEL pursues his way without turning or answering CAIN'S desperate cry.
CAIN
Must I believe? In bitter truth
Art thou so vile, so abject?—Then, farewell!
Leave me! my heart is sick to know thy shame!
Leave me!—my soul abhors thine infamy!
Leave me!

CAIN covers his face with his hands.
ABEL
Farewell!

ABEL moves away. CAIN takes his hands from his eyes and stands, stirless, watching him depart. His face is haggard.
CAIN.
Weep, for a soul is lost!
Weep, for a heart betrays its human trust!
Weep, for a traitor's shame! The Son of Man,
Who, in the days to come, shall haply be
Himself a Father of Men, has turned from truth!
Suddenly CAIN'S face changes as a new thought takes possession of him.
Himself a father—then—
CAIN, transfigured, overwhelmed by his thought, leaps forward and seizes ABEL violently by the arm.
Thou canst not go!
Thou canst not go! Thy soul must see the truth—
Or—

His speech stops suddenly. His eyes stare as tho' confronting a dreadful prospect.
ABEL
Cain!—Release me!

CAIN
Nay, thou canst not go!
This hour is more momentous than I dreamed!
Man, I forgot that not thy paltry fate
Nor mine alone must find decision now!
Man, what of thy children, what of them?
Thou shalt be sire of daughters and strong sons,
Passionate men and women!—Abel! Abel!
Turn to the ways of light lest they shall be
Beggared of all but servitude and shame!

ABEL
Madman! Release me!—Let me pass!

CAIN
Be still,
Coward, be still! The scales of judgment bear
A freight more precious than all thy dreams have guessed!
Fool! dost thou think that were 't thyself alone
Standing in jeopardy, I should not now
Watch thy desertion in a silent scorn,
Choked with the horrour of thy great cowardice?
Yea, and how gladly! were my heart assured,
Losing thee, to forget my love for thee!
Man, how I loved thee!—but no more of this—
Heart breaks, yet life constrains our service still,
And mine is still to say—Thou canst not go!

ABEL
If reason is still existent in thy brain,
Give me the cause of this extremity!

CAIN
The cause is grave beyond thy power of thought
And holds dominion both for thee and me,
Who share the selfsame trust and equally
Safeguard the sacred heritage of life.
We are not merely men but more than men
Since we are pregnant of futurity.
We are not measured by the fretful years
That span our being, since we store the seed
Of myriad generations yet unborn.
We are the start of young humanities!
We are the spring and freshet of mighty streams,
That thro' the reach of the unending years,
As thro' vast fields where darkness wars with dawn,
Shall keep their fruitful and resistless way!
We have within us such an utterance
As once proclaimed shall peal forevermore,
Echoed and multiplied from age to age,
Down thro' the endless labyrinth of time!
We are the scabbard of a sword of flame,
We are the wardens of the House of Life,
We are the guardians of a sacred fire,
We are the gates of Dawn,—the First of Men!
Such is the cause!—for this we shall not yield
The torch of freedom to the winds of fear,
Nor blight the burgeon from the seed of truth
With frost of lies or dust of ignorance!
Nay, we must shield the torch and guard the flower;
We must be perfect in our sacred trust;
We must preserve, in strength and faith and love,
Our whole inheritance that all may share!
Not for the safety of a mean content,
Not in the terrour of a wrathful God,
Shall we renounce the treasure and the task,
Or sell the birthright of the Sons of Man!

ABEL
Thy cause compels not me! I know full well
There shall be shelter upon the breast of God
Thro' all of time, for all the Sons of Men
Who live obedient to His perfect will!

CAIN
There shall be chains for slaves and whips for curs,—
But we!—Are we not men?—express and whole
In all the power and faculty of being?
Are we not deathless souls?

ABEL
Release me!

CAIN
Never!
Never shall I release thee till my hand
Shatters the shuttered windows of thy soul,
And shows thee, tawdry in the great light of truth,
This tinsel majesty, this powerless ghost,
This mouthing masque thy fears have hailed as God!

ABEL
Devil!—Release me!

CAIN
Abel—

ABEL
No, by Heaven,
I will not pander to thy lunacy!

CAIN
Abel, compel me not! I am a man
Driven by desperate emergencies!
Never, I swear, shalt thou betray thy trust!
Nay, thou must here fulfil thy sacred charge,
Shatter thy bondage, cleanse thy soul of lies,
Nor evermore, diseased with cowardice,
Go forth to life!

CAIN is suddenly silent. His eyes are caught by the knife which ABEL had used to sacrifice the lamb and which now lies on the platform where he let it fall. CAIN stares at it in a kind of horrible fascination. ABEL, startled by the sudden break in CAIN'S speech, glances up at his face and then follows his eyes. ABEL sees the knife; he sees CAIN'S expression.

---

304

At once his face is transfigured with terrour. Silently and desperately he struggles to escape. CAIN holds him without removing his eyes from the knife.
ABEL
O God, protect me! God,
My God, protect me! O my God!

CAIN
Be still!
He turns to ABEL and cries out in a terrible voice.
Abel!

ABEL
O God!

CAIN
as before
Abel!

ABEL
Merciful God,
As I have served Thee in humility,
Guard and protect me!

CAIN
as before
Abel!
Changing to a tone of desperate entreaty.
Not for thee,
For me 't is fit to make beseeching prayers!
Pity me! Spare me! Man, be true to men!
Spare me this deed!—Spare me!—I cannot choose!

ABEL
Save me, Almighty God! Transcendent God,
Save me, thy servant, Abel!

CAIN
Must it be?
O generations of my seed unborn,
Children of my conception, Sons of Man!
Now for your sakes I tear my heart in twain,
Ravage the confines of my life and hurl
Down from my shattered heavens the light of joy!
Yours is this sacrifice,—for you, for you,
For your salvation, for the Soul of Man!
Abel—I love thee with a perfect love!

ABEL
Devil! Release me!—O my God! My God!

CAIN
So young he is!—So young!—O bleeding heart!
Man can do nothing more for man than this!
He puts forth his hand swiftly and grasps the knife. He shudders.
How can I do this deed?

ABEL
Almighty God,
Thy slave implores thee!—Save me! Save me!
CAIN drives the knife deep into ABEL'S heart.
Cain!

The knife drops from CAIN'S hand. He stares at the body of ABEL. His face is haggard.
CAIN
He is dead!
I have killed the man I loved, my brother, Abel!

Instantly the scene is plunged in total darkness. A tremendous storm rages. Thro' the thunder of the elements is heard the voice of GOD, pealing like a bell.
The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain! Where is Abel thy brother?
Cain! Cain! Where is Abel thy brother?
Cain! Cain! Where is Abel thy brother?

A flash of lightning reveals CAIN still standing on the platform with ABEL'S body in his arms, heedless of the elements.

ACT III

GENESIS

CHAPTER IV

9. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

10. And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

11. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

12. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

13. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

14. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; AND I SHALL BE A FUGITIVE AND A VAGABOND IN THE EARTH; AND IT SHALL COME TO PASS, THAT EVERY ONE THAT FINDETH ME SHALL SLAY ME.

15. And the Lord said unto him, THEREFORE WHOSOEVER SLAYETH Cain, VENGEANCE SHALL BE

TAKEN ON HIM SEVENFOLD. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

[OMITTED]

25. And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel whom Cain slew.

The same scene as in Act I.

Night: a few hours after the close of Act II. The sky is overcast. In the distance are heard from time to time rumours of storm.

EVE appears at the door of the tent. She pauses, listening intently.

EVE
Silence.—High in the sunless, starless, changeless,
Infinite void and naked visions of sleep,
Treble and clear as chimes, a far voice called:
“Bereavement!”
Again she listens intently.
Silence.—The hours with noiseless feet,
Vacant and solitary and passionless,
Have found me vigilant of the voiceless night.
My heart has heard the heart of silence beat;
Mine eyes have stared into the dense, dead, dark,
Desolate visions of calamity
And glimpsed the lurking demon of despair,
While in my veins the violent life-blood beat
Like muffled thunder!
Again she listens.
Silence—and no light—
Nothing—O Lord, how long?—Where are my sons?
Where are my children?—Abel!—Cain!—My sons!
Again she listens.
Silence—My heart will break! My heart will break!

The voice of CAIN from without
Mother!

EVE
At last!

The voice of CAIN
Mother!

EVE
The voice of Cain!
Cain! Is it thou?

CAIN
entering
Mother!

CAIN is wild and tragic. EVE stares at him, startled and anxious.
EVE
What ails thee, child?
Speak, dear one, speak!

CAIN
Mother!

EVE
My darling, come!
Lie on my breast—I love thee, love thee—Come!
Weep if thou must—the tears will ease thy pain.
Come to me, come!
CAIN remains stirless, silent, haggard.
Cain!—Child—What ails thee?—Speak!
Thy face is scared and tragic as my heart—
Why art thou strange? What is thy message? Speak!
If irremediable calamity
Smites me once more, if fate is pitiless,
Still let me know the worst!—it can be never
More dire an agony than this suspense!

CAIN
Mother!

The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain! Where is Abel thy brother?

EVE starts back, panic-stricken. CAIN remains as before.
EVE
His voice!—His voice!—Gardens of Paradise!
Midnight of desolation!—Wild despair!
Dear God, I thought forgetfulness was earned!
But now the mountain, builded from the dust
Of all the lonely and lamentable years,
Quakes, and the crater's mouth so long time dumb
That flowers had rooted in the thrifty sod,
Flashes with fire from the volcanic past!
Now by His voice, the voice of God, the shroud,
Weaved by the patient hands of Time, is rent;
The stone is shattered on the sepulchre,
And Death, gaunt Captain of a tragic host,
Marshals his legions on the fields of thought!
His voice—O Cain, hearest thou the voice of God?

CAIN
Mother—

EVE
His voice!—What new catastrophe
Impends?

The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain! Where is Abel thy brother?

EVE
Abel?

CAIN
Mother—

EVE
Cain!

CAIN
Hear me! Hear me!

EVE
Cain!
Where is thy brother Abel?—Abel!—Abel!
Why art thou here alone?

The voice of GOD
What hast thou done?

CAIN
Mother—it must be thou shalt understand!
Mother!

EVE
Where is thy brother Abel?

CAIN
Dead!

The voice of GOD
The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground!

EVE
Dead?—Cain! Your eyes! Answer me face to face!
Abel is dead?—My child is dead?—and you—
Why are you here alone?—Answer me!—Cain,
Put both your arms about me pitifully:
Mine is the very life thro' all your veins;
Body and soul were sacrificed, great woes
And dire travail endured that you might live!
Close me within your strong embrace, your breast
Here on my breast that bled to nourish you,
And tell me—Cain, my first-born and most loved—
He is not dead?

CAIN
Mother!

EVE
It cannot be!
Abel! Abel! Abel!

CAIN
His ears are deaf,
His eyes are blind. Thy heart and mine may break,
He shall not care:—the man is dead.

EVE
No! No!
God pity me! God pity me!

CAIN
His soul
Failed in the test of truth; he could not bear
The burden and the power of life—and now,
Now is he lapsed into oblivion.

EVE
O son!—Abel!—My child!

CAIN
My heart will break!

EVE
Abel, most young and loveliest child of earth,
Last and most tender of the sons of man,
Mine was thy life, thy death must now be mine!
Come to me, Death, divine and silent Death!
Shed from thy noiseless wings eternal sleep,
Pour thine elixir thro' the veins of life,
Spirit of Death, resistless, secret Death!
Since thou hast laid thy finger on his lips
Who was my child, thou canst not leave me here
Telltale of life's disaster, starved of hope,
Curious of nothing in the days to come!
Change in thine alchemy the days of life
To thine eternity, the fever of life
To thy tranquillity, the memories
Of life at last to thy forgetfulness!
Since thou hast plucked the flower and bruised the bud,
Wither the stalk, uproot the parent stem,
Scatter thine ashes, blight the wasted sod!
Let me not linger with my broken heart
To watch with visionless and tearless eyes
The desolation of my destiny!
Nay, let me perish since my child is dead—
I can endure no more!

CAIN
Thou canst not die!
Not alms but wages life demands of death.
Life must be suffered for the sake of life.
And then—Mother! thy sons were twain,—O Heart,
Wilt thou abandon me?

The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain!
Now art thou cursed from the earth,
Which hath opened her mouth
To receive thy brother's blood
From thy hand!

EVE
Silence! I say—Silence!—His voice has lied!
God's voice has lied! But soul is steadfast—Cain!
So vile a slander fails its damned intent:
Not by thy hand! Not by thy hand!—Speak! Speak!
Speak to me!

A brief, tense interval of silence.
The voice of GOD
Cain! Where is thy brother Abel?

CAIN
in violent outbreak
Am I my brother's keeper? Nay, by Heaven!
I am the keeper of the gates of life;
I guard the treasure of all humanity:
Mine, mine is life's inevitable trust,
Mine is the sacred heritage of man!
Are not the generations stored within me?
Shall not the harvest yield as I shall sow?
Is not the trust my life was made to keep
Vexed by the hand that mars the perfect seed
Or robs their birthright from the sons of man?
How shall I suffer that such a traitor live
When by his life the future world is doomed
To stumble in the shadow of ignorance
Stung by the lash of self-inflicted fears?
Shall I not rather with violence even and death
Safeguard the treasure in jeopardy and keep
Flawless the sacred seed? What less than all
His just inheritance of power and light
And liberty can man bequeath to man?
Mother—when Abel sought to pawn the treasure,
Pollute the seed, debase the soul of man—
What could I do but strike the traitor down?

EVE
Silence! Silence!

CAIN
Heart breaks but soul is free!

EVE
Heart breaks!

CAIN
I loved him—yet he might not live!

EVE
shrinking suddenly from him
Murderer!

CAIN
Hear me—

EVE
Murderer!

CAIN
Be still!
By God rejected, cursed and shunned by man,
My heart took refuge in the thought of thee!
Wilt thou desert me?—I am Cain, thy son:
Thine by the very deed thy heart abhors!
Soul of thy soul, flesh of thy flesh I am!

EVE
Thou liest! My son is dead!

CAIN
I am thy son!

EVE
I know thee not!—Where is thy brother Abel?

CAIN
He is where all is dumb, deserted, dead;
He lies alone, cold on the mountain's peak;
His shroud is moonlight; round his lofty bed
Great planets veer from verge to verge of heaven,
Like ships of light cleaving a shoreless sea;
The universal multitude of stars
Stare in his sightless eyes; beside his corpse
My broken heart, my whole life's happiness,
Lie in the still companionship of death!
O I have slain him to my misery!

EVE
To thy damnation hast thou slain a man!

CAIN
For man's salvation have I slain a man!
And now, now as thou art my justicer,
Now as my soul lies bare at thy command,
Now shalt thou answer, serving truth in turn:
Tell me where's Eden? where is Paradise?
Where is the loveliness that pleasured thee?
Where is God's grace that filled thy delicate days
With ripe contentment and surpassing peace?
Where are the candid and beneficent joys?
Where is the primal innocence of man?

EVE
I will not speak!

CAIN
My cause demands—

EVE
No more!
Ask me no more!

CAIN
At last light breaks within you!

EVE
Silence! Thy words are senseless to my soul.
Paradise?—Eden?—they are lost, God knows!
Lost beyond hope—I know not whither nor where.
Pure and serene as starlight was my being,
Till time and truth, parents of tragedy,
Scrawled on the tablets of my virgin heart,
As scrawls a stylus on a stainless scroll,
The passionate chronicle of life and death.
Clear were mine eyes and questionless as flowers
Till the flame-flashing sword of Cherubim
Blinded my vision to all God's glory and grace.
My lips were flushed with laughter and soul slept,
Careless of destiny:—but now mine eyes
Are deep with dreams, desires and lamentation;
Still on my lips beneath the taste of tears
Lingers the fruit's immortal savour; still
Soul thrills with revelation!—Sense and soul
Live and remember—how can God forget?
And unforgetful how can God forgive,
Or teach my feet the paths to Paradise?
Eden is lost, the light of grace is quenched,
Gone is the primal innocence of man!

CAIN
Gone—gone—shuddering, fading, lost, lost, lost:
How deep a burial are the seas of time!
All that lived once immediate to our souls,
All that our lives were governed and pleasured with,
Pass and when memory stares with doubtful eyes
Well-nigh her scroll is vacant of their names.
Eden is gone—remembrance knows not where;
Yet, by its loss, was man's existence changed,
Man's soul transformed: thy hand that grasped the fruit,
Why was it so supremely hazardous?
What hope compelled thy venture on the seas,
The sullen shattered waters of God's wrath?

EVE
I served life—life compelled me—life was born,
Born of my deed, and life's creative pangs
Lifted my heart, where love leaped like a flame,
Beyond the bare desire of happiness.
Ask me no more the wherefore of my deeds,
Ask me no more!—When first my brain conceived
Rebellion, and my heart careless of peril
Felt the ineffable longing of liberty,
How could I then withhold my impassioned hand,
Measure my hopes with vile arithmetic
Or count the hazard of my enterprise?
My compass veered, seeking the pole of truth;
Wind smoothed and swelled my lean and wrinkled sails;
My hawser snapped:—headlong I took the seas!
When suddenly life demanded utterance
Was not the destiny of life within me
To make or mar?—Dear God, I could not choose!
I turned from God, imminent of my sons,
And like a priestess at the altar of life
Offered the irrevocable sacrifice
And grasped the ripe inheritance of man!

CAIN
Mother of men!

EVE
Vain beauty of Paradise,
Barren desire and search of happiness,
Well-nigh of your remembrance is my heart
Vacant and vain repentance moves not me.
There was a woman innocent in Eden,
Glad of her childish laughter and fragile joys,
Scatheless of passionate rapture,—she is dead.—
Is dead, and her repentant heart no more
Beats in a breast bruised with the lips of children.—
The freed slave weeps not for his manacles
Nor can a mother's heart repent her sons.

CAIN
At last, Spirit of Life, maternal Heart!
At last still steadfast, still unconquerable,
Still undismayed I find you tho' despair
Cover you with impenetrable shadow!
Mother of Men, Cain is your very son!
Your words furnish my deed's apology
And plead the justice of my fratricide.
My heart leaps to your welcome, all my heart!
Mother!

EVE
Be still! I know not what you mean.
I know but this—Abel, Abel is dead:
Dead by the murder of your pitiless hands!
Blood-guilt and madness have depraved your sense!
Yet was he very gentle and a child—
Why hast thou killed him?

CAIN
When my brain conceived
Rebellion, and my heart careless of peril
Felt the ineffable longing of liberty,
How could I then withhold my impassioned hand?

EVE
Why must you turn my words to shameful jest?
Why in sheer insult must you mock my grief?

CAIN
You wrong my soul! Mother, what is within me
Seeking translation from my thought to yours
Puts in my mouth what words will serve its end.
O I am too tragic of all my thoughts and deeds
Too strained past life's endurance of despair,
Had I the will, to mock your misery!
Hear me and let the sword your justice draws
Hang on the thread of my relation.—I
Share your catastrophe—

EVE
Say on—God knows
It matters nothing since my son is dead.

CAIN
Dead!—and my love was only less than yours!
Enough!—there has been too much said of sorrow.
Hear me: my tale shall witness what I am.
Alone with Abel in the splendour of evening
I stood exalted on the mountain's crest,
Far in the firmamental solitudes.
We saw together the earth, how fair it was,
Charted beneath us, and the globe of heaven
Poised in august serenity and stained
With sapphire, saffron, and vermilion.
Heart leaped with wonder! Then was Abel moved,
Staining with blood the stone of sacrifice,
To fawn on God with such base flatteries
As might a slave cringed at his master's feet!
Shame scourged my soul—I poured the lustral oil,
Spilled the new wine, scattered the tender grain,
And sought, mindful of human dignity,
God's fellowship that God may share with man.
And then—then—then—God's voice rejected me!
Canst thou believe? God's voice rejected me!
Even then, then as heart swelled with nameless love,
Then as within me a so stainless hope,
A faith so perfect filled my being with light,
Then as from man to God my soul aspired
With power and incommensurable peace,—
Then, then God's voice rejected me! My soul
Shuddered like to a ship that strikes and drowns;
I was dumb; night whelmed me; the world reeled with storm;
Chaos was in my brain, and fierce despair
Stunned my conception.—Then as one who feels
The shapes of nightmare fade in the first light,
I felt the ghosts of fear and weak despair
Fade in the breath of a stupendous dawn!
For in the passion of my peril I sought
And found at last who God is, what I am.
As daybreak lifted ever a larger light,
Then all the pageant of the past unrolled:
And I beheld, grave with immortal meaning,
Clear in the unconquerable van of thought,
The dire, dim legend of man's innocence,
The secret of all God's jealous tyranny,
The tree which God's commandment strove to keep
Inviolate—all the marvel and might of knowledge,
The power of life, the glory of rebellion,
The fire and love of liberty, the pride
Of freedom, poverty, solitude, and pain:
All the delight and all the tragedy
And all the burden of manhood—and the soul
Won at so huge a cost from Paradise!
Shining in the white light of revelation
The past stood in my vision and within me
The present hour of life flashed like a flame;
And far, far in the unfathomable, far beyond
To-day or the dumb æons of yesterday,
I saw the vistas of To-morrow fill
With life asking its just inheritance!
Mother!—so once for thee magnificently
The vision dawned: so even for me it dawned!
And I, nobly resolved in equal trust,
Master of man's prodigious destinies,
Eloquent of august expectancies,
Elate desires, faith ineludible,—
I turned to Abel, brimmed the bowl of love
Deep with new wine of light and gave his soul
The lustral cup, the great communion!
I cried, “Share with me all the treasure and task!”
A brief pause of intense silence.
Mother!

EVE
No!—No!

CAIN
As God rejected me,
Abel rejected me. I was alone!

EVE
Alone—

CAIN
Outlawed from man's love and God's mercy,—
Yet for the sake of man!—for Abel chose
To take the hire and bondage and forego
The inherent spiritual arbitrament
Of manhood for the sins and deeds of life.
Standing against me by the throne of Heaven,
He chose to forfeit all the lustre of living,
And thus, beggared of human quality,
Barren of sin or virtue, void of truth,
Scared at the flashing fire of liberty,
To seek contentment at the feet of God.
And then, then, as he cursed me turned and fled,—
Suddenly as the sea-wind lifts at dawn
And shakes the constellated canopy
Of heaven and murmurs wandering thro' the silence,—
As thou, hesitant ere thy young lips crushed the fruit,
I felt the destiny of man within us
To make or mar—in him—in me—in man!
I called, beseeched him—he was stunned with fear
Of God's revenge; he cowered, turned, and fled!
And then, just as the all-reviving sun,
Even as one who guards a sanctuary,
I struck the traitor down!—He might not live
To breed a sickness in humanity
And bring pollution to the springs of life.

The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain!
Now art thou cursed from the earth,
Which hath opened her mouth
To receive thy brother's blood
From thy hand!

There follows a pause of great silence. CAIN looks at EVE with eyes of anxious expectancy.
CAIN
Abel is dead—God speaks—and thou art silent:
My punishment is greater than I can bear!

EVE
the words breaking from her like a cry of pain
My son!—My child!

CAIN
Mother!

EVE
O Cain, Cain, Cain!
Dear God, can life suffer such monstrous things
Nor die delirious of its agonies!
This is worst, to understand thee as I do,
To love thee living and Abel dead,—and all,
All by thy perfect and implacable deed!
O God! love is a bitter catastrophe!
To understand thee as I do!—Behold,
My feet pash in his blood to come to thee!
I reach scared hands across his corpse to grasp
Thy nervous fingers stained with fratricide,
And drowned in the dark tears I weep for him
Mine eyes appeal, my voice beseeches thee!
Come to me, Child, thou who hast slain my child!
Tragic Adventurer, come home to me!
Come—come—I crave thee with my sorrow's strength:
Here are my arms, here is my breast—I love thee!
Light burns my brain—I understand—I know—
Child, thou hast torn the veils and pitilessly
Shown me the inhuman, flawless face of truth.
At last I know Life is indomitable,
Ruthless because resistless; yea, and feel
The irreparable necessity of death,—
Tho' Abel lies lifeless beneath the stars!
Come home to me,—thy tears shall blend with mine.
Weep! Weep! so pitiable is man's destiny!
For now, since I have utterly harvested
The whole heavy inheritance of sin
And sucked the apple of Eden to the core,
Now is my knowledge more than I can bear!
Bankrupt to pay the dreadful price of truth,
I must default all lesser debts of life.
O I am broken-souled and solitary!
Strong Son of Man, come home, I need thy love!
Let us together, voiceless of our woes,
Weld heart to broken heart, spirit to spirit,
Since not alone can heart or soul endure
The inveteracy of life and death and truth!

The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain!
When thou tillest the ground,
It shall not henceforth yield to thee her strength;
A fugitive and a vagabond
Shalt thou be in the earth!

A pause. Then suddenly,
EVE
in a terrible voice
Childless!

CAIN
heedless of her cry; to himself:
Destiny! Yea! His voice proclaims
What must be so, the sheer inevitable,
My deed's fulfilment since the choice is made.
I must desire my life lived otherwise
To ask new destinies for the man I am.
No—No—the price is just:—I choose to pay!
For past and future I will be forever
A fugitive from fear's safe prison-house,
A vagabond of truth's confineless realm,
A homeless pilgrim of the Great Idea!

EVE
Childless!—O God, pity me! God pity me!

CAIN
Hush! God is powerless and His violent hands
Vacant of mercy or vengeance or dominion.
Knowledge is freedom: and for this last truth
My life has paid with bloodshed and bitter sorrow.
Believe! Beseech not! for the threads of fate
Escape the violence of God's sheer caprice,
And on the warp of nature's tapestry
Subtly devise the pattern of men's lives.
God is like one who by the wayside stands
And points to each the inevitable way
That leads him where his will has fixed the goal;
Or like a herald on the battlements,
Vigilant of the stars processional,
Who, when the Virgin and the Huntsman stand
Midmost upon their stately journey, calls
“Midnight!”—and all the sleeping City of Life
Murmurs, “His word has fixed the vagrant stars
And brought to sequence and establishment
The mutable multitude of the errant hours!”
And even as such a one is powerless,
Stretching his debile hands, to leash the Bear,
Tether the Lion, bind the Pleiades,
Or change the gradual periods of Time,
So God is powerless to enact his will,
But, watchful from the tower of thought, proclaims
The imminent and inexorable truth.
Voiced like the thunder, like the thunder he
Hurls not the lightning but proclaims its fall.
He is the creature of our cowardice,
The name by which we conjure, when at last
Suddenly revelation racks the soul
With prescience of the inexorable truth.
I am the Lord of Life, who find my path,—
Haply in twilight—yet the day spring flows!
Each shall pronounce and bear his doom save God;
For, tho' our fears conceive him, he is not.
Life shall transpire in his despite and death
Minister to the weary wayfarer:
The flower shall not be wasted from its bloom
Nor winter yield in the creative sod
At his command but as their Nature wills.

EVE
Hush—Hush—It matters nothing.—Abel is dead;
Thou shalt depart—and leave me childless, childless!

CAIN
Mother, it must be as the soul demands:
Justice shall not refrain nor truth relent:
What is shall be endured. For life's sole sake
Wast thou creative. Ask no more of life
Than life, for life has nothing more to give—
No alms for misery, no wage for toil—
And nothing less in all the days to come.
Beauty and happiness are casual gifts,
Superfluous splendour of the spendthrift days,
Pearls that adorn the sombre robes of life,
Gathered at random on the shores of time.
The fruit is of thy labour and pain and peril,
Yet life that sows shall reap the harvest. So,
So and forever we sorrow and serve till life
Breaks like a lute-string drawn beyond its strength.
What is the love that made thee mother of men
But life's imperishable desire for life,
The mounting sap, the elemental lust,
Blent in thy heart's alembic with the light
Of lovelier and still human ecstasies?
O Heart, what more or less is love than this?

EVE
Ask me no more! My brain is dying, my heart
Is dying, my body is dying of life's wounds!
As me no more—God pity me! God pity me!

The voice of GOD
Cain! Cain!
A fugitive and a vagabond
Shalt thou be in the earth!

EVE
Childless!

CAIN
Nor God, nor life shall pity thee;
But truth shall show thee by what light we live
When all is lost.

EVE
I know for you the light
Shall lift and revelations wake for you.
Yours shall be all the great and lonely joys,
The ecstasy of the imperishable thought
And breathless visions of truth's impartial fire
Dawning on vast horizons of the soul!
Your days shall be ascending avatars;
You shall transcend the realms of time's control,
And pass entire to that eternity
Glimpsed by the soul's astronomers whose eyes
Catch the brief spendour as the fragments flash
Like meteors thro' the stagnant night of life!
But I, I who am Eve and mother of men,
Robbed by the hands of death and by God's hands—
What is prepared for me? Behold me, Cain:
My life is naked, no magnificence
Shall lift the darkness from my haunted eyes!
Cain, I am childless!

CAIN
Yet creative still!
Still shalt thou suffer and weary for thy children,
Tho' truth it is Abel shall come no more
At nightfall, tenderly, to comfort thee,
And truth it is that in the populous earth
I shall be fugitive and vagabond,
Hid from God's face and from the face of man;
And truth it is that for the sole truth's sake
All men who find and know me as I am
Shall rise and slay me in a frenzied fear.

The voice of GOD
Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain,
Vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold!

EVE
Vengeance for Cain? Vengeance, by God's decree,
For Cain, Life's Captain, victor of his cause
In earth and heaven against God's legionaries?
Vengeance for Cain, for Cain the fratricide?
A seven-fold vengeance doomed by God's decree
On whomsoever shall slay the slayer of man?
Verily then the voice of God proclaims,
Obedient to the inexorable truth,
Not His resistless will but what must be!
And yet—why vengeance for the death of Cain?
Wherefore from all men and above all men
Shall Cain be saved?

CAIN
I am the torch-bearer!

EVE
Till now my tears have blinded me; at last
I see and know,—thou art the Son of Man,
Thou art the Saviour—and my son, my son!
Love and forgive me! for the blood of Abel
Rose, a red mist between thy soul and mine!
Now I am weak no more; I say to thee:
Go forth, go forth, lonely and godlike man!
My heart will follow tho' my feet must stay.
Yet in thy solitude shall there be a woman
To care for thee thro' the incessant days,
To lie beside thee in the desolate nights,
To love thee as thy soul shall love the truth!
In her thy generation shall conceive
Passionate daughters, strong and fierce-eyed sons
To lift the light and bear the labour of truth
Whereof the spark is mine, the fire is thine!
Men of thy seed shall scourge the face of God;
Women of her conception shall deride
The laws of men! Singly they come forever
To scare God in His heavenly palaces,
To shake the sleep of the lethargic world,
To wreck establishments and bring to scorn
Laws and obediences and cast
Wrathful derision on the creeds of peace!
The fire you bear invincibly shall pass,
Imperishably shall burn from hand to hand,
From age to age—no power can quench the flame
Flashed from the dawn of soul's eternity!—
And now—Go! Go! Leave me or else I die!
Go! while the power is in me,—lest I yield!

CAIN
Farewell! Woman, the voice of prophecy
Speaks in your mouth—the light shall never die.
I love you, love you with a measureless love!

EVE
Cain!—Cain!

CAIN
Farewell! My will and mine alone
Has made me outcast from the laws of men,
And from God's laws, and from the homes of men.
I am the man I am: no cause but this
Has cast me naked and lonely from the pale,
To wander, alien in the Academe,
Cursed and derided in the market-place,
Slandered and scourged before the shrines of God.
O I shall weary with all the woes of the world!
And when I shall lift up the immortal light
Like dawn in the dark places of men's souls,
All men shall hail it as a ruinous fire
Born for their world's destruction; they shall rise,
Nerved with ferocious fear, and hale me forth,
Seize me, traduce me, judge me, and condemn,—
And press the hemlock to my unshrinking lips
Or nail my scourged flesh naked to the cross!

EVE
Yet shall the great light live!

CAIN
It shall not die!
Farewell!

CAIN turns and moves away. The night is ended. On the remote edge of the world, under a line of dark clouds, the young dawn glows, tawny and splendid.

CAIN goes forth straight into the dawn. EVE watches him rapt, transfixed, haggard, agonized. His figure grows small in the distance. The dawn greatens.

Suddenly from the tent is heard the voice of ADAM, just waking from sleep.

The voice of ADAM
Eve!

EVE shudders and slowly turns her eyes toward the tent. ADAM appears in the door.
ADAM
Eve!—where art thou?

EVE
with a great cry
I am woman!
Mother of men—and childless, childless, childless!