The Poetical Works of George Barlow :: :: University of Virginia Library

At last the silence of the years is broken;
We apprehend at last creation's plan:
Time's word the centuries waited for is spoken;
Thought's pulpits echo with the doom of man.

Our century, closing, hears with awe and wonder
Truth's golden trumpet ring to heaven's blue dome,—
Outgrowing Christ's love, outgrowing his Church's blunder,
Sees Science lift the veil of things to come.

With one hand red from labours anatomical,
The other pointing to the stars on high,
Science proclaims—as if the thing were comical—
“Sun, moon, and stars, and man's whole race, must die!”

Man in the viewless past sprang not from heaven,
Gifted with angel-powers and angel-shape.
Upward from slimy pulp the race has striven:
Eden's fair sovereign was, no doubt, an ape.

172

That was commencement, noble and exalted,
Of Homer's, Milton's, Hugo's, Shakespeare's race.
We walk. Our hairy predecessors vaulted
From tree to tree with far more agile grace!

Fate's blind force working through its countless creatures
Blundered upon a thousand stars maybe,
But on our globe by chance struck out man's features;
Mixed various salts and made—by chance—the sea.

Fate's blind force through all time experimenting,
After exploding planets, many a one,
At last succeeded, for the gas relenting
In new proportions mixed—and made the sun.

The trees were all results of chance expedients.
A rose, that was blind Fate's most glorious flight!
The scents of flowers were mixed of strange ingredients:
Ten million centuries' efforts made—a mite.

But one day all went wrong. Fate's yeasty crucible
Boiling all over with fierce frothy flakes
From elements inharmonious, irreducible
To fair results, produced the venom of snakes!

173

Chance, nought but chance! A cobra di capello,
A rattle-snake, a shark, a humming-bird,
A Desdemona, Iago or Othello,
All sprang to being at blind Fate's casual word.

And history, with its sickening sights that freeze us
To silent horror, all is chance as well.
Chance brought to birth a Buddha or a Jesus:
A freak of thought dug the red pit of hell.

However long man's work endures, it perishes,
Fades in the end as surely as 'twas born:
The noblest poet the heart of mankind cherishes
Is as the may-fly of one summer morn.

Shakespeare's immortal? While his tongue is spoken:
But England's very self shall pass away,
Pass to the darkness starless and unbroken,
The unsounded depth that knows not night from day.

All shall be wasted—effort, labour endless,
Sin, suffering, virtue,—all shall be as one.
Pale shall the earth be, lonely, helpless, friendless,
When time chills deep the bright heart of its sun.

174

What shall it avail that in ten thousand churches
Man's soul to Christ its ceaseless tribute brings?
Earth whereon Death the dark-winged vulture perches
Forgets its heroes and dethrones its kings.

No compensation waits in heaven for any:
There is no heaven to compensate or bless.
Some few were happy; but the suffering many
Groan without hope, are wronged without redress.

Woman is slave, and shall be slave for ever.
She weeps, she toils, she sins,—this is her doom.
Purity, brightness, gladness, freedom never!
The streets for home, the river for a tomb.

Her struggles all are fruitless. Fate will surely
Maintain the sovereignty of man the strong.
Poets have sung of her, and yet securely
Chained with a wreath and ruined with a song.

It matters little what her soul long bearing
Has moaned beneath, what torments and what rod;
For centuries towards the stars her cries despairing
Have risen and risen, yet never reached a God!

175

There is no God to reach, no ear to hear her,
No tender heart in heaven to heed her prayer.
Christ stooped, she thought, from heaven to aid and cheer her;
But now that very heaven is voiceless air.

The race had hope that one man had evaded
The spear of Death, the universal doom,
And that by Christ's victorious right hand aided
Man too might reach the stars beyond the gloom.

Not so! That hope ineffable and tender,
That faith transfiguring man's heart with its gleam
Of more than mortal light, for all its splendour
Was woven in fairy-land—it was a dream.

Aye, each redeemer of the race, surrounded
By signs and portents, journeyed on his road:
At Buddha's birth what miracles abounded!
In his queen-mother's womb a strange star glowed.

One system ever it is, one range of wonders;
Air-castles builded, till the air-turrets fall:
Till Time with but one tremor of its thunders,
One slight sufficient earth-shock, levels all.

176

The coming centuries have to love, to labour,
To sing, to enjoy, to struggle, in the light.
Darkness was ever miracle's near neighbour,
But now thought's sunshine makes an end of night.

The twentieth century's doom's exceeding dismal!
It has to march, with stern-browed Truth to lead,
Towards moonless plains and forest-depths abysmal,
Past many a cold, once fairy-haunted, mead.

No Puck to break our sleep with gambols tricksy!
Night's paths, so full of music once, are mute.
Within the moonlit woods no harp of pixy!
No cloven-footed Faun with wanton flute!

Nothing to break the dreary desolation;
All secrets probed, all mystery solved at last!
In truth ours is a luckless generation:
Happier, I think, was almost all the past.