Spread a verdant glitter on plain and hill.
Flowery meadows shone, gay, birthday sheen,
Many-coloured embroidery of green.
Meanwhile fresh germs were nursing strength beyond
The modest grass that carpeted the ground.
In them all a strange, a wild yearning woke
To taste upper air; from the soil trees broke.
Ah the sense of liberty, the keen zest
Of a roaming instinct that stirred Earth’s breast!
Thus she by herself in bush and tall grove
Probed the mystery of the realm above;
Foliage anticipating in space
The down and feathers of a wingéd race.
Next, in many, manifold modes, not come
From salt pools, or sky-dropped, but from the womb—
Bewildering variety of birth—
Of the one universal Mother, Earth,
Life, under impulses of rain, heat, light,
Found organs of movement, even of flight.
Nor yet is her inventiveness outworn;
Still, through the same forces, are fresh forms born.
But well it may have been that in old days,
When Earth was quicker, livelier, in ways,
Air larger, the diversity in kind
Was more, the size greater, than now we find,
Vitality faster in ev’rything.
Thus, eggs would be hatched by the sun in Spring,
As the cicala strips its body bare
Of its fine coat, and needs no mother’s care.
And now Earth’s motherliness that had first
Found its scope in herbage, in due course nursed
Human life itself.
Wombs from moist heat grew
Soil-fixed by roots that nutriment thence drew.
This children, when they broke forth, sucked, and then,
Issuing to air, walked erect as Men.
Owing thus to one source—Earth’s breast—their milk,
For clothes her breath, for couch turf soft as silk.
Fit season for creative pow’rs to wake,
When cold did not numb, gusts confusion make,
And unlike natures could in peace assume
Their just traits, and find, without jostling, room.
With fair intervals since the birth of Man,
Almost each beast and bird we know began
To range mountains and air, although at length
Earth, like to mortal mothers, waned in strength.
Change is Nature’s prime law; stage follows stage;
And the engine by which she works is age.
A plant from flower droops into decay;
Another from dust blossoms for its day.
Earth is in endless flux; she cannot bear
Qualities once loved; kinds are not which were.
Legend is thus encouraged to relate
Tales of wonders in Earth’s creative state.
We hear of bodies twofold, each a kind,
Bound in one frame, but with a single mind.
Inconceivable Centaurs!
At three years
A horse is full-grown and all burdens bears;
At that age a boy can but play, and rest;
Yearns aloud in sleep for his mother’s breast.
Hardly is life for the young man begun
When the wind-galled steed’s course long since was run.
And Scylla? She might have chos’n to be fish,
Or to bark as dogs, and have had her wish;
But as a pair!
And Chimæra again?
Well for the Three to work as each is fain;
But, however it is with dragons, goat
And lion boast not of a flame-proof coat.
So, of the new Earth and Heaven—dreams told
Of rivers running sudden floods of gold;
Trees with gems for flowers; giants of height
To wade deep-rushing waters, and a might
That could make Olympus a ruined heap;
As if, because young Earth was used to keep
Elements and seeds dormant, when they came
At length to life, they need not be the same!
Fancy “improved” them from real freaks, born,
Living, if lives scarce human, and forlorn.
From instinct creative, but cross-grained, Earth
Brought monsters—aspect and limbs strange—to birth;
Abnormal the whole—some with parts too few,
Some with more, though all human, than were due.
Horse-men, mermaids, dragons, gold-streams, gemmed trees.
For Nature are impossibilities.
Had they once existed, there is no cause
Why the race should have ceased through Nature’s laws.
The freaks of Earth were actual, and led
Earthly men’s lives; horror, if they had bred,
As they might have but for good Nature’s grace!
She, guardian of the purity of race,
Rejecting them from the kind, by her ban
Of Childlessness, saved the descent of Man!
Nature works marvels; many are combined,
When she plants, and bars trespass on, a kind.
First, long experiments will have been tried
Before candidates find their way inside.
Even with claim allowed, how many have
Left, to prove they lived, nothing but a grave!
Food may have failed, elbow-room, or good will
In new-come neighbours strong to do them ill.
Among survivors a part owe their life
To native power to outlast long strife.
A habit may have been acquired to keep
Vigils while the enemies were asleep;
Or consciously they set wit against wit,
And, with life for stakes, enjoy playing it.
That is reynard’s way; lions’, less, resource,
Than valiant rage has been the ruling force;
And a third quality has saved a race,
Agility—deers’ pow’r to devour space.
Again, Man is grand destroyer; so breeds,
Many, owe survival to his large needs.
Dogs might have been classed with wolves; but we prize
Them as loyal light sleepers, best allies.
Some kinds, beasts of burden, willing or not,
Exchange protection, meals, for freedom’s lot.
To flocks and herds attack by beasts of prey
Was a nightly scare; it has passed away.
They are secured from that, or lack of food,
Since their extinction would lose Man a good.
But kinds that neither can resist a raid,
Nor have the right to call Man to their aid,
What for them but death, if worth while as spoil,
Or sharp riddance, cumberers of the soil?
Such final dooms as these may well have struck
A multitude of kinds out of life’s book;
And Earth, as women, fills not gaps; her stage
Of maternity obeys laws of age.
Not Man, first-born of Earth, of those that fail;
Child of a lusty mother, hard and hale;
Built on a frame-work of big, solid bone,
With tough sinews to weld the flesh in one;
Not made with heat to faint, or cold to freeze,
To sicken with strange meat, or by disease.
Men led wandering wild beasts’ lives; the sun
Had revolutions numberless to run
Ere they harrowed fields, guided the curved ploughs,
Planted young orchards, or lopped rotting boughs.
Meanwhile they gathered Earth’s alms, well content
With the chance harvests sunshine, showers sent;
Though food on which our ancestors relied
Was that the boundless woods of oak supplied.
Acorns were their mainstay, with, in large store,
Berries that young Earth’s teeming fallows bore.
They felt not how miserable they were;
For Nature pitied, and gave ample fare.
To slake thirst they but had to track the sound
Of torrents tumbling from great hills around—
A call their fellows, the wild beasts, knew well.
And oft a man would linger in some cell
Of Wood-Nymph invited by the cool air,
Since thence broke springs unfailing. Here and there
They bubbled round rocks, loitering to play
With each; then would awhile sleep on their way
In soft green moss, before all joined, to flow,
One easy gliding stream, to the smooth plain below.
As yet men had not learned to tan a skin
Robbed from some beast, and dress themselves therein.
Forest, or mountain cave, was the sole home—
If that,—they knew. When, as they chanced to roam,
A storm burst, rain, or whirlwind, they would lie,
Grimy, in the thick scrub, till it passed by.
Each one was for himself; none of them could
Rise to an idea of common good;
“Custom”, “Morals”, things unknown; and what use
In laws, when no act required an excuse?
Aught a man saw, and liked, he took; so long
As none other saw, liked, and was as strong.
The only need, a standard how to test
Animal worth—live as fitted that best.
Savage love, although not without its storms,
Was simpler than ours, direct, free from forms.
If two agreed in those natural days,
They wedded, as were weddings; went their ways.
Were he willing, not she, he won consent
With a stick: and she had to be content.
When rich the wooer, quick the bargain made,
And the price in acorns, or berries paid.
In our times, though passion may burn, its flame
We call discreetly by some other name;
Is it force to warn daughters that to wed
Poverty means just a mother’s death bed?
And as for a sale of hearts, dare compare
A lawyer’s settlements with a swine’s fare!
Still, in essence a likeness we may find
In our modes to those of the new-world kind.
Hunters all, by virtue of speed of foot,
Patience no less, they ran down any brute;
Hands as dexterous hurled a storm of stones,
And wielded clubs that crashed through flesh and bones.
Rarely were they baulked, or had to lie low,
Hunted, the hunters, by a stronger foe!
Sometimes night surprised them, led by the chase
Far from their customary haunts. Small case
They made of that; strewed leaves, and on the heap
Threw themselves, like wild beasts, and were asleep.
Pity not that beneath no roof they lay,
As darkness followed on the close of day.
They wailed not, doubting its return, for light,
Till with rosy torch the Sun banished night.
The two had from their childhood come and gone;
Why fear the Dark, unwatched, might rule alone?
To them who never knew of locks and bars,
A roof seemed a worse guardian than the stars.
Rather it was when they had sought repose
In caves they met most danger from their foes.
It might occur to some wandering beast,
Making the night hideous, to infest
A recess it passed: and, however glad
The tenant to buy life with all he had,
His fate would be to glut a lion’s maw.
Plunged live in a live tomb by tooth and claw;
Though worse their doom, who, with huge gobbets jagged
From the bleeding flesh, about the woods dragged
Noisome centres of horror and pest—palms
Trembling o’er sores for which they knew no balms;
Calling with agonizing cries on death
To sink their remains to the world beneath.
Alas!
Though measure age with age; nor let
Us in compassion for a few forget
How hosts that, eagles gleaming, marched to war,
Return, less thousands weltering in gore;
A navy that rode yesterday the waves,
To-day is matchwood, corpses robbed of graves.
Ocean in Earth’s infancy swelled with pride,
And lightly laid its empty threats aside;
Laughing tides might mean treachery, or not;
Mortals could plead no wreck to prove a plot;
Famine slew a good few in the Age of Flint;
Surfeit’s as homicidal as is stint;
For themselves poisoned meats rude nomads dressed;
With polished art we serve them to a guest!
A stage on; huts, plaited boughs; men therein
Who stripped for clothes their prey of fur and skin.
Chief of all discoveries theirs to learn
How the thing we call “Fire” will flame and burn.
First, lightning brought it, darting from above;
Though men might watch its birth in any grove,
For when gales blow, the old trees sway about,
And from the boughs in friction sparks flash out.
The sun taught many uses; how the heat—
Repeated rays—will gradually beat
Hardness mellow, and, with fire’s aid, prepare
The soil’s crude fruits and grain for human fare.
Thus, from a hearth and rough shed, rose a home,
With revolutions many thence to come;
And when stop?
With comfort, unknown of old,
Men grew impatient of rude toil and cold.
Plenty and leisure stirred the torpid heart;
And love and tenderness required their part.
Marriage fought free-love; couples plighted troth;
And offspring were the property of both.
Pledges of love, they had power to warm
Beyond the circle where they were life’s charm.
How could a father keep a heart of stone,
When he felt a child’s throbbing on his own?
Tenderness breeds tenderness; men at length
Recognized binding duties owed by strength
To weakness—assuming what it has willed
Must be done—in the stammer of a child
Dictating to its father. From the hearth
Sympathy with helplessness spread through Earth.
Right of the weak was the keystone whereon
Neighbours that would not do or see wrong done,
Founded their leagues; AND THOUGH SOME BASE WAR-LORD
WOULD HERE AND THERE BE FALSE TO HIS SWORN WORD,
THE BEST, THE MAIN PART, STOOD BY THEIRS, PURE, CHASTE:—
Else, mankind had perished, Earth been a waste!
Throughout it all, Mankind was being taught
To voice the rising requirements of Thought.
Gradual process! Gesture was first stage;
The fingers point a want in infant age.
Each creature feels what force the best to spend
To indicate a need, and gain an end.
An angry calf soon after it is born,
Butts with forehead not armed as yet with horn;
Whelps of panthers, and cubs of lions treat
As weapons teeth to be, and clawless feet.
Chickens ruffle spread-wings, as at a foe,
Threatening trespassers things they might do.
What emotion will not all beasts succeed
In expressing, though without speech, at need?
Your Molossian draws back his large, soft lips,
And shews his hard teeth! Strangers, ware, he grips!
Then comes an old friend of the Master’s—hark!
With frolic round and round, the joyous bark!
So with the whole tribe; whether in a glow
Of love they lick their pups; or to and fro
Roll them—mimic rage—and bare, as to glut
Cannibal hunger, teeth in jaws half shut.
All who know but a little of the kind,
And listen to the scolding match, will find
Worlds of difference from the doleful bay
Of hound deserted, whipt, cow’ring away.
Horses, again; does not the rule apply?
You tell by a steed’s neigh that mares are nigh;
Straightway he feels the spur of wingéd love;
They interpret his challenge to the drove.
But—nostrils spread, the neigh become a snort;
War steeds, jangling armour, pass—he would join the sport!
Nor are birds, ospreys, gulls, without their choice
Of vents for feeling; all unlike the voice,
In wooing, to the hunger-scream of strife,
Or victor’s, grappling sea fish for its life.
Even, it is believed, some kinds that ride
The air have means by varied cries to guide
Men’s acts. Rough throated rooks and crows are said
By secular sign-reading to have bred
An instinct when winds, floods, rain they would have,
To warn of weather coming that they crave.
Thus, ears attest the ways that have been found
By lower races to converse by sound,
Strange if Man, Nature’s first-born, built not speech
On sounds for meanings diverse, one for each!
Fond fable that one knew all names, and then
Distributed them to dumb fellow men!
Before common use, by what means learned he
Articulate speech had utility?
How urge men as good as deaf—so, the rule,
Sulky—for no clear gain, to go to school,
When Nature had already, by design
For them, through combining powers, to reign,
Giv’n versatility of voice and tongue
To plan, to act, and drive the world along!
Strength in union; this the great, first law,
From which, and its self-sacrifice, men draw
Sovereignty in Nature; thence learned to bow
To chiefs in mind and heart, who taught them how
To change forms of living and life for new.
From acceptance of son after sire grew
Kingship and kings; with cities in due course,
And citadels as centres of armed force,
Or royal refuges in civil strife;
For complex soon became national life.
Wealth counted first by cattle, and by land;
And the State’s part was at the King’s command.
By his own standard he apportioned it,
For strength or beauty; sometimes mother-wit.
Laws of inheritance grew fixed; and great
Landowners vied with kings to rule a State.
Gold came; race, steel, charm, acres ceased to reign;
All gave gold way, and followed in its train.
An owner used it to earn rule and fame;
Less for themselves—not e’en so high his aim—
Than that he sought to hide some stain of earth.
None blushed to rank by accidents of birth;
But rank through money! Rich men would disguise
That flaw by vouching aught else for their rise,
They wished wealth for enjoyment, yet to shun
Odium for it behind honours won.
Vain! each peak climbed breeds on its own account
Envy with traps to trip you as you mount;
The more, and loftier, surer the flash
Of a bolt, and for you, amid the crash,
To find yourself contemptuously hurled
Into the foul pit of the Underworld.
Flee gold and power, both; neither is one
With happiness; or sheds bliss on a throne.
Few who have touched the goal aver the good
Equals the price they paid in sweat of blood.
Better it satisfies to be of those
That obey than to sway realms, and crush foes.
Hear Reason, and know wealth, absolute, whole,
Is so to live that means disturb not soul.
You wish to forbid Penury your door?
Then adjust your house-keeping to your store.
Ambition exalts to abase; your eyes,
If they see, will teach you its lures are lies.
Earth’s masters despised these truths; they who had
Supremacy and wealth went drunk and mad
With licence; worms could bear no more; and crown,
And lordship—heads with them—came tumbling down.
Majesty was a ball for mobs to spurn;
Awe’s excess was matched by excess of scorn.
It was the dregs’ orgy; rule of brute force;
And each man’s fury followed its full course.
Guilt will, whatever an offence, appear
Less heinous to third persons than seen near.
Trial now was before a Court of one;—
Judge, suitor, he to whom the hurt was done.
Vengeance extreme would rouse convict, or kin,
To redress disproportioned to the sin,
And, unindulged, leave on the other side
A balance owing, and unsatisfied;
Enmeshing in either case a wide swarm
Of households pledged to work each other harm.
A blood-feud chokes enterprise;—earn reward
For deeds, when hangs over the door a sword!
Then, in all ages, let him who shall dare
Set rolling stones of civil feud, beware!
Whatever lives earlier it may spoil,
It will not miss him out; it must recoil,
No peace at home for one who has, the first,
Poisoned man’s faith in man; he is accurst.
Skulk as he may, himself does not believe
He shall for aye be able to deceive;
In sleep, fever-raging, he will proclaim
His sin, and roam clad in the sheet of shame!
Drear this “mid passage”, when, as themselves thought,
Emancipated, men were sold and bought;
Bondsmen to cunning demagogues, who saw
Their gain in putting off the reign of Law.
But ev’n the Multitude will not endure
Chaos, save as interlude. Hence the cure.
Mankind wearies of frauds; of vengeful deeds,
Infinitely renewing, like ill weeds.
From lassitude it lets the wise and good
Enlist strong arms to stem the turbid flood.
In time some sage arises to extract
Ideas of right, that laws condense to act.
Youth long since was past; Nature stood aside,
Leaving Man to face problems, and replies provide.
Iphigenia
Bk. I. vv. 80-102
Think not I, and in Reason’s name, blaspheme
Holy truths. Nay, for this would ill beseem
My purpose. To bring home impious deeds
Done as for Religion—that is my theme.
Who knows not of Aulis—the Chiefs arrayed
About the Altar of the Trivian Maid—
Lords, chosen of Achæa, kings of men,
Reluctant murderers, ashamed, afraid.
And lo! though startled, with no fear at all—
For how suspect ill in her loved sire’s call!—
A girl, young; yet ripe for marriage; perhaps,
Summoned to adorn that high festival!
What if some tremor? In her flow’r of days,
Brought hither for the host of Greeks to gaze,
And admire the Fair, a young hero’s bride.
Hark! is not that the wedding chant they raise?
Courage! Faint not; here are brave friends will bear
Thee to the Altar; all await thee there!
“Who, and for what?” She knows not, but a steam,
A blood offering, scents she in the air.
In a trance she moves; round her a void space.
Awed as if at Death’s halo on Youth’s grace,
Warriors shrink as on the Princess comes,
Abashed to look their victim in the face.
A priest’s touch—the tresses in which maids bind
Their waving hair have found themselves confined
By a sacrificial fillet, the ends
Circling each cheek, and flowing down behind.
She wakes. Flash on her soul—the Fleet’s delay—
Her Mother’s despair as she went her way—
The wrath of Artemis, Her gory rites—
Basilisk glance as Calchas passed that day!
And her sire—not once to have turned and smiled
Upon his best beloved, his first-born child—
The gleam from a ray on a Thing ill veiled—
And a swell of sobs that could not be stilled!
Her knees fail her; and how not? how sustain
The horror! her father to will to stain
His dagger with her blood! to breathe beneath
A load of inextinguishable pain!
So, shed Iphianassa her pure life,
Borne in shuddering arms to a Sire’s knife:
Printing with chaste blood incestuous stains,
Re-dyed later by a foul, vengeful wife!
The whole to verify a priest’s surmise,
Prove privity with Heav’n in vulgar eyes!
No matter how Gods’ credit was abused,
Or sweet innocence sacrificed to lies.
Maternal Love
Bk. II. vv. 342-380
Admire how Nature, with her jealous care
For purity in kind, still schemes to pair
Mother and child by features that forbid
Confusion in the common home all share.
Members of a kind insomuch agree;
Yet each is itself; whence diversity.
Mutual recognition rests on that;
Family ties without it could not be.
No human convention; dumb cattle can
Be sure where love is due, no less than Man.
An universal instinct—and, for guide,
A sense of differences—Nature’s plan.
A calf may its innocent life resign
On the altar before some stately shrine,
Shedding a flood of warm blood ’mid the steam
Of incense, and libations of red wine.
And the Mother! in many a green glade
She tracks the lost by prints his feet have made.
Each spot she studies, in the fond belief
The faith of love can never be gainsaid.
Then, from the woods that her moans overflow,
An impulse drives her to renew her woe
At the stall, where a passionate regret,
Piercing her heart, tosses her to and fro.
Not willow saplings, dewy grass, nor sight
Of brimming rivers, with, in warm noon light,
Cool pools to stand in, banish pain and ache,
Much less, yield an interval of delight.
A calf at play impose on her belief!
Be accepted as hers, and bring relief!
Numberless signs attest it not her own;
Both like and unlike aggravate her grief.
’Tis given not to flocks alone and herds
To mark diversities, but wild beasts, birds,
Joying in lonely groves, and streams, and lakes,
Even fish that understand without words,
As they swim the deep, paint in shells the shore,—
Nay, grains of corn themselves, an endless store,
Remain distinguishable, one and all;
Are known apart by learnéd in such lore.
Art works after one pattern, and by rule;
Nature as the mood inspires, not a school.
She is certain in idea; diverse
In embodiment; never same and dull.
Echo
Bk. IV. vv. 525-536, 549-596
Sound, voice are bodies. Though not for the hand
To grasp, sense feels them, acts at their command.
They wind into the ear, and strike the drum;
Hark! response, as to a conductor’s wand.
The voice even can hurt, as fist, or saw.
In full volume, hoarse, grating on the jaw,
Jostling its way in haste to worry through,
It leaves the path it travels rough and raw.
And no less bodily a spoken word;
When moulded, and dressed, to be rightly heard,
And winged by that arch modeller, the tongue,
It slips through the lips, and careers, a bird.
If the length to be traversed is unfair,
Symmetry is marred; speakers must prepare
For dazed confusion in their audience,
And only a blurred rumbling in the air.
Then set a Herald in a market place.
For him thousands of eyes gaze from one face;
And he flings at the whole a single word,
That each will drink-in as his special grace.
It multiplies, and with the hearers; all
Receive stamped facsimiles, to recall
Both form and sound, distinct, as that went forth;
Each can claim his own for original.
Human ears are the goal; and when no ear
Is reached, after roaming everywhere
In vain for shelter, the poor thing expires,
To flit a ghostly leaf, dead, shrunk and sere.
Or chance may be that it collides with rock;
When—as with pebble that recoils—the shock
Returns the voice thither whence it had come,
And so unchanged that it appears to mock.
Natural the cause, effect; the surprise,
When in lone spots a company’s loud cries
After stragglers on dark hills, bring back nought
But old words in old order as replies.
Where a height faced height, I have known a shout
To gambol between in a joyous rout,
And six or seven times reverberate;
Like ball thrown to and fro in play about.
Nothing is out of Nature’s course, the mode
In which She acts; but Fancy loves to load
Being with mysteries; not learn the laws
Within our ken that rule Earth, our abode.
Thus, a charmed husbandman will vigils keep,
Imagining far echoes breaking sleep,
’Mid silences that seem to hold their breath,
To be Pan come, half God, half Beast, with leap,
And rustle of his bristly, pine-wreathed head—
Drawn lip running o’er shrilling pipe—to lead
His troop, goat-footed Satyrs, Nymphs, and Fauns,
Till cliffs and caves reply to chords and reed.
He deems that shy Powers, as falls the Dark,
In solitudes—no prying crowds to mark—
Fill woods and hills with music, wind and stringed,
That he hears till the day-star wakes the lark.
For ears hear as they list.
The world is wide,
With wildernesses wherein few abide.
Remote from busy marts these joy to dream
Some Gods do not disdain to dwell beside!
The Seasons
Bk. V. vv. 736-746
The pageant of the Seasons! Venus comes; She brings with her,
As leader of the revel, winged Zephyr, Spring’s harbinger.
And Flora has spread a carpet, finer was never wove,
All hues and fragrances, to be trod by the Queen of Love.
Next enters red-hot Summer; but its droughts are lightly borne
By good Goddess Ceres; for they ripen the standing corn
Nought ashamed is She of the dusty sweat upon her brow.
Foreseeing her sheaves, how more and heavier they shall grow;
Nor even scolds the North-wind; it steels the straw to sustain,
By its rough embraces, the weight of the hardening grain.
Autumn steps close after; and it too with a God for guide;
Hark! shout the vineyards, “Bacchus! Hail to Bacchus!” far and wide.
And now Earth’s “No-man’s land!” Spring, Autumn, Summer here and there;
While up and down dance the Winds in the Kingdom of the Air.
South-easters roar through woods where green leaves whispered yesterday;
And thunders the South on meadows that wear the bloom of May.
But the Year is waning; in the long chilly Dark it sits;
No more, though by mere spasms, it breaks out into merry fits.
Sulky and dull it mumbles its tempers in fog and sleet;
Its joints are stiff with age; it totters on frost-bitten feet.
’Tis Winter, with a train pinched like itself, and short of breath,
That shivers, and, as it moves, rattles its remains of teeth.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.