Collected Poems: With Autobiographical and Critical Fragments ::

Come then, poor worm at war with Fate,—
(What inward Voice spake stern and low?)
Come, paltry Life importunate,
Enough of truth thou too shalt know;
Since man's self-stirred out-reaching thought
Hath seen in vision sights of awe;
Hath from a darker Sinai brought
Damnations of a vaster Law.

From dust, they told thee, man was born?—
The Cosmos' self from dust began,
In days that knew not eve nor morn,
Nor brooding Spirit nor breathing man;

385

See first-begot from Nought and Night
The gathering swarms, the flamy gale!
That cold, that low, that fitful light
Showed in the void an iron hail.

Then lone in space the comet hung;
Then waxed the whorls of cloudy glow;
Then each on other swept and swung
Enormous eddies, formless flow;
One Law, one Force and manifold,
Bestrewed high heaven with sparkling fire,
Burned in Orion's belt of gold,
And lit the Dragon and the Lyre.

Cooled the great orbs, and whirling flew
Their planet-offspring outward thrown;
On wheeling planets strangely blew
A breath unbidden and unknown;
No Mind creating watched alone,
Nor bade the emergent minds begin;
To weltering waters, senseless stone,
The seed of Life had entered in.

And first a glimmering ease they had,
And creatures bound in dream benign,
Obscurely sentient, blindly glad,
Felt the dim lust of shower and shine;
Then works the unresting Power, and lo!
In subtler chain those germs combine,
Thro' age-long struggle shaping slow
This trembling Self, this Soul of thine.

386

Rash striving into sad estate!
From anguished brutes the plaint began,
Sighed in man's soul articulate,
And breathes from Beings more than man;—
Ye have called them good, ye have called them great,
But whom have these for hope or prayer?
Nay, with what cry their end await
But silence and a God's despair?

Ye have called them gods, ye have called them kings;—
Too well their impotence they know,
Forth-gazing on the waste of things
With stern philosophies of woe:
Isled in their Sirius, Titan-strong,
They watch his warmth how slowly fail;
He fades, he freezes; long and long
Drives on the dead the iron hail.

Then all is silence; all in one
The exhausted orbs have crashed and sped;
Cold to the core is every sun,
And every heart that loved is dead:
The Night of Brahm lies deep and far,
The Night of Brahm, the enduring gloom;
One black, one solitary star,
The Cosmos is the cosmic tomb.

387

Nor yet thereby one whit destroyed,
Nor less for all that life's decay,
Thro' the utter darkness, utter void,
Sweeps the wild storm its ancient way:
Still fresh the stones on stones are hurled;
Their soulless armies shall not fail;—
Beyond the dooms of world and world
Drives in the night the iron hail.

On the hypothesis here illustrated, the gradual aggregation of cosmic dust (practically known to us in the shape of meteoric stones and iron) forms comets and nebulae; the nebula of our solar system becomes a sun and planets; life appears on the cooling planets; and they are ultimately merged again in the sun. Higher beings than man are evolved elsewhere, presumably on large and slowly-cooling orbs; but although we men may imagine such beings as divine, they themselves recognise their powerlessness in face of a universe which is as inscrutable to them as to us. The suns of our stellar system crash together, evolve heat, and repeat the cosmic process; but ultimately lose heat into space and are agglomerated into one cold and dark mass, from which the last life disappears. A night of indefinite duration sets in—such as that imagined by Hindoo cosmogonists between successive self-manifestations of the universe; and in this night the cosmic dust alone is conceived as still speeding through infinite space.

University of Virginia Library

A COSMIC HISTORY