Edwin Markham

Once Phidias stood, with hammer in his hand, Carving Minerva from the breathing stone, Tracing with love the winding of a hair, A single hair upon her head, whereon A youth of Athens cried, “O Phidias, Why do you dally on a hidden hair? When she is lifted to the lofty front Of the Parthenon, no human eye will see.” And Phidias thundered on him: “Silence, slave: Men will not see, but the Immortals will!”

Has the bright sun set, Has the gale grown stronger? Still we’ll not grieve yet: We will sing a while longer! Has our youth been met By Time the wronger? Let us not grieve yet, Let us sing a while longer! Is the world beset, Do the sorrows throng her? Let us not grieve yet: Let us sing a while longer!

For all your days prepare, And meet them ever alike: When you are the anvil, bear— When you are the hammer, strike.

The moon shears up on Tahoe now: A panther leaps to a tamarack bough. She crouches, hugging the crooked limb: She hears the nearing steps of him Who sent the little puff of smoke That stretched her mate beneath the oak. Her eyes burn beryl, two yellow balls, As Fate counts out his last footfalls. A sudden spring, a demon cry, Carnivorous laughter to the sky. Her teeth are fastened in his throat (The moon rides in her silver boat.) And now one scream of long delight Across the caverns of the night!

A host of poppies, a flight of swallows; A flurry of rain, and a wind that follows Shepherds the leaves in the sheltered hollows For the forest is shaken and thinned. Over my head are the firs for rafter; The crows blow south, and my heart goes after; I kiss my hands to the world with laughter— Is it Aidenn or mystical Ind? Oh, the whirl of the fields in the windy weather! How the barley breaks and blows together! Oh, glad is the free bird afloat on the heather— Oh, the whole world is glad of the wind!

Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. —Genesis. Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave To have dominion over sea and land; To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; To feel the passion of Eternity? Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf There is no shape more terrible than this— More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed— More filled with signs and portents for the soul— More fraught with danger to the universe. What gulfs between him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest that is also prophecy. O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb Terror shall reply to God After the silence of the centuries?

Alone I list In the leafy tryst; Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep— Silent the phantom wood in waters deep: No footfall of a wind along the pass Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass. Yonder the wandering weeds, Enchanted in the light, Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white; Yonder are plumy reeds, Dusking the border of the clear lagoon; Far off the silver clifts Hang in ethereal light below the moon; Far off the ocean lifts, Tossing its billows in the misty beam, And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream: I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken: This is the valley: here the branches darken The silver-lighted stream. Hark— That rapture in the leafy dark! Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing, Waking the upland and the valley under? What carols, like the blazon of a king, Fill all the dawn with wonder? Oh, hush, It is the thrush, In the deep and woody glen! Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung, When the old Earth was young; That rapture rang, When the first morning on the mountains sprang: And now he shouts, and the world is young again! Carol, my king, On your bough aswing! Thou art not of these evil days— Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth: Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth— How to find God upon these hungry ways; Tell of the golden prime, When bird and beast could make a man their friend ; When men beheld swift deities descend, Before the race was left alone with Time, Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end; Before great Pan was dead, Before the naiads fled; When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold, With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold, Startled the still dawn— Shone in upon the mountains and were gone, Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old. Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways, Before the weird earth-hunger of these days, When there was rippling mirth, When justice was on Earth, And light and grandeur of the Golden Age; When never a heart was sad, When all from king to herdsman had A penny for a wage. Ah, that old time has faded to a dream— The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream; Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let The exiled race not utterly forget; Publish thy revelation on the lawns— Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns; Sometime, in some sweet year, These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear. But hark again, From the secret glen, That voice of rapture and ethereal youth Now laden with despair. Forbear, O bird, forbear: Is life not terrible enough forsooth? Cease, cease the mystic song— No more, no more, the passion and the pain: It wakes my life to fret against the chain; It makes me think of all the agéd wrong— Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all— Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall. Ah, ah, that voice again! It makes me think of all these restless men Called into time—their progress and their goal; And now, oh now, it sends into my soul Dreams of a love that might have been for me— That might have been—and now can never be. Tell me no more of these— Tell me of trancéd trees; (The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare) Show me the leafy home of the wild bees; Show me the snowy summits dim in air; Tell me of things afar In valleys silent under moon and star: Dim hollows hushed with night, The lofty cedars misty in the light, Wild clusters of the vine, Wild odors of the pine, The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon— High places where on quiet afternoon A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream. Ha, now He springs from the bough, It flickers—he is lost! Out of the copse he sprang; This is the floating briar where he tossed: The leaves are yet atremble where he sang Here a long vista opens—look! This is the way he took, Through the pale poplars by the pond: Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond. Ho, there he goes Through the alder close! He leaves me here behind him in his flight, And yet my heart goes with him out of sight! What whispered spell Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell? I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream— Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on the fading stream. Lead on—you know the way Lead on to Arcady, O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim; Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim; By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome, Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam. I follow where you lead, Down winding paths, across the flowery mead, Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows, Up water-courses scented by the rose. I follow the wandering voice— I follow, I rejoice, I fade away into the Age of Gold— We two together lost in forest old.- O ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn, Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod! O souls that are weary and are heavy laden, Here is the peace of God ! Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way: Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray; From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run, With sudden apprehension of the sun; A light wind stirs The filmy tops of delicate dim firs, And on the river border blows, Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose. Sing out, O throstle, sing: I follow on, my king: Lead me forever through the crimson dawn— Till the world ends, lead me on! Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now, Upspringing from the bough, Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground, Without a sound He drops into a valley and is gone!

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down To make a man to meet the mortal need. She took the tried clay of the common road— Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth, Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy; Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears; Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff. Into the shape she breathed a flame to light That tender, tragic, ever-changing face. Here was a man to hold against the world, A man to match the mountains and the sea. The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; The smack and tang of elemental things; The rectitude and patience of the cliff; The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; The friendly welcome of the wayside well; The courage of the bird that dares the sea; The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; The pity of the snow that hides all scars; The secrecy of streams that make their way Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock; The tolerance and equity of light That gives as freely to the shrinking flower As to the great oak flaring to the wind— To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West, He drank the valorous youth of a new world. The strength of virgin forests braced his mind, The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul. His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth. Up from log cabin to the Capitol, One fire was on his spirit, one resolve— To send the keen ax to the root of wrong, Clearing a free way for the feet of God, The eyes of conscience testing every stroke, To make his deed the measure of a man. He built the rail-pile as he built the State, Pouring his splendid strength through every blow: The grip that swung the ax in Illinois Was on the pen that set a people free. So came the Captain with the mighty heart; And when the judgment thunders split the house, Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again The rafters of the Home.   He held his place— Held the long purpose like a growing tree— Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

There came gray stretches of volcanic plains, Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw. Around were heaps of ruins piled between The Burn o’ Sorrow and the Water o’ Care; And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls One pillar rose up dark against the moon. There was a nameless Presence everywhere; In the gray soil there was a purple stain, And the gray reticent rocks were dyed with blood— Blood of a vast unknown Calamity. It was the mark of some ancestral grief— Grief that began before the ancient Flood.

I would my soul were like the bird That dares the vastness undeterred. Look, where the bluebird on the bough Breaks into rapture even now! He sings, tip-top, the tossing elm As tho he would a world o’erwhelm. Indifferent to the void he rides Upon the wind’s eternal tides. He tosses gladly on the gale, For well he knows he can not fail— Knows if the bough breaks, still his wings Will bear him upward while he sings!