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

God recreates the earth and air,
And makes the vast blue waters fair,
And makes the earth's wide meadows green
For every genius therein born;
For each regards the past with scorn
As if it had not been!

Each genius, by his birthright grand,
Inherits sea and sky and land;
For each God clothes all stars anew
In fiery splendour.—Shakespeare's dead!
But still the sun is golden-red,
And still the waves are blue.

The first white snowdrop is as fair
To genius, when Spring's soft hands bear
Her gentle early gifts to him,

As if no snowdrops ever leaped
Before above the mould, or peeped
Into the crocus-rim.

And unto genius most of all
Is woman ever new. Eve's fall
Made her perhaps less strangely fair
To Adam. But though Adam grieve,
His Eden holds an unfallen Eve
And genius finds her there.

Yes; ever to the genius-eyes
The tender light of Paradise
Beams forth from woman's perfect look.
Her lips are fragrant as the flowers
That in life's morning's golden hours
From Eden's banks she took.

God, that he might forget her fall,
Created genius most of all,
And set within the genius-brain
The power of worship passionate;
That woman he might reinstate,
And honour her again.

That God might constantly repeat
His own deep sense of wonder sweet,
The passionate awe, the joy sublime,
Which first he felt creating Eve,
He made the genius-heart achieve
The same work through all time.

Subordinate to his alone
He set the kingly genius-throne,
And bade his poet-souls receive
His thought anew; that every age
Might so repeat the Eden stage,
And shape its perfect Eve.

II.

So genius finding all things new,
Must recreate its kingdom too
And pay no homage to the past.
“Lo! God is in these hills and streams.
With miracle the present teems:
With wonder sweet and vast.”

But no man listens to his tale.
He seeks to draw aside the veil
That hides the solemn stars of space:
He seeks to represent to man
God undivulged since time began
Save through some human face:

But no, mankind will nought of him.
His own friends say, “How strange a whim!
We knew that poets lived of old;

We knew that prophets spake of God;
But this man do the same? How odd!
His heart is overbold.

“Poets have lived. The whole world sang
When Shelley's wondrous live harp rang,
And thrilled the height and thrilled the deep.
All nature in her joyous hours
For Keats' brow wove her fairest flowers;
Aye, lulled him soon to sleep.

“The whole of history spake indeed
Through Hugo. What soul can succeed
In adding aught to things once said?
Yea, God himself who made the sun
Was satisfied—he made but one.
Darkness! if that were dead.”

Darkness? O fools, the solemn night
Brims over with perennial light;
A hundred million suns in space
Flame round about the Eternal's throne,
And each sun guards and herds its own
Planets that wheel and race.

But ever genius must renew
The same old struggle, wrestle through
The same old thickets of dismay;
Be dubbed Beelzebub, when most
Inspired by that strong Holy Ghost
Who lives and speaks to-day.

Still must the son of God, the bard,
Find life's long battle bitter hard,
Meet envy, hatred, wrath and scorn;
Still will he, struggling hard to lift
Mankind, receive mankind's one gift—
Christ's battered crown of thorn.

III.

Moreover, genius never feels
Save in extremes.—Its whole brain reels
With wild delight, or rocks with woe.
From one extreme it plunges on
To other heights and depths that none
Save genius' self may know.

It worships God, it worships long
Within his house with prayer and song;
Then lo! his Temple's gold gates close:
The poet sallies forth, and finds
Lovely upon the summer winds
The soft breath of the rose.

Unstable? Yes, but even so
The thoughts and songs of genius grow
And eddy along their destined course.

All is extreme. All is superb
And strong and reinless; without curb;
Unfettered, full of force.

God speaks not only in one hour,
Not through the beauty of one flower,
But through the flowers of endless time.
When genius and the Lord collogue,
They speak not in the vulgar brogue
But in a tongue sublime.

The commonplace well-balanced fool
Who speaks by rote and lives by rule,
What shall he of God's glories see?
What shall he know of woman's heart?
Or of the mountain-range of Art
Or of Art's ecstasy?

But genius, wild, extreme, perverse,
With lips that bless, or lips that curse,
Brow-bound with thorns, with sorrow shod,
However man's heart may despise
The deep love-yearning in its eyes,
Is strangely close to God.