Poems. Edward Dowden

bigger than a man’s hand on the rim,

      To rise with rain and thunder in its womb,

      And blot God out! But no such cloud would come.

      I felt my brain on fire, heard each pulse tick;

      It was a God to make a man stark mad;

      I rose with neck out-thrust, and nodding head,

      While with dry chaps I could not choose but laugh;

      Ha, ha, ha, ha, across the air it rang,

      No sweeter than the barking of a dog,

      Hard as the echo from an iron cliff;

      It must have buffeted the heaven; I ceased,

      I looked to see from the mid sky an arm,

      And one sweep of the scimitar; I stood;

      And when the minute passed with no event,

      No doomsman’s stroke, no sundering soul and flesh,

      When silence dropt its heavy fold on fold,

      And God lay yet inert in heaven, or scorn’d

      His rebel antic-sized, grotesque,—I swooned.

      Now when the sense returned my lips were wet,

      And cheeks and chin were wet, with a dank dew,

      Acrid and icy, and one shadow huge

      Hung over me blue-black, while all around

      The fierce light glared. O joy, a living thing,

      Emperor of this red domain of sand,

      A giant snake! One fold, one massy wreath

      Arched over me; a man’s expanded arms

      Could not embrace the girth of this great lord

      In his least part, and low upon the sand

      His small head lay, wrinkled, a flaccid bag,

      Set with two jewels of green fire, the eyes

      That had not slept since making of the world.

      Whence grew I bold to gaze into such eyes?

      Thus gazing each conceived the other’s thought,

      Aware how each read each; the Serpent mused,

      “Are all the giants dead, a long time dead,

      Born of the broad-hipped women, grave and tall,

      In whom God’s sons poured a celestial seed?

      A long time dead, whose great deeds filled the earth

      With clamour as of beaten shields, all dead,

      And Cush and Canaan, Mizraim and Phut,

      And the boy Nimrod storming through large lands

      Like earthquake through tower’d cities, these depart,

      And what remains? Behold, the elvish thing

      We raised from out his swoon, this now is man.

      The pretty vermin! helpless to conceive

      Of great, pure, simple sin, and vast revolt;

      The world escapes from deluge these new days,

      We build no Babels with the Shinar slime;

      What would this thin-legged grasshopper with us,

      The Dread Ones? Rather let him skip, and chirp

      Hymns in his smooth grass to his novel God,

      ‘The Father’; here no bland paternity

      He meets, but visible Might blocks the broad sky,

      My great Co-mate, the Ancient. Hence! avoid!

      What wouldst thou prying on our solitude?

      For thee my sly small cousin may suffice,

      And sly small bites about the heart and groin;

      Hence to his haunt! Yet ere thou dost depart

      I mark thee with my sign.”

      A vibrant tongue

      Had in a moment pricked upon my brow

      The mystic mark of brotherhood, Cain’s brand,

      But when I read within his eyes the words

      “Hence” and “avoid,” dim horror seized on me,

      And rising, with both arms stretched forth, and head

      Bowed earthward, and not turning once I ran;

      And what things saw me as I raced by them,

      What hands plucked at my dress, what light wings brushed

      My face, what waters in my hearing seethed,

      I know not, till I reached familiar lands,

      And saw grey clouds slow gathering for the night,

      Above sweet fields, whence the June mowers strolled

      Homewards with girls who chatted down the lane.

      Is this the secret lying round the world?

      A Dread One watching with unlidded eye

      Slow century after century from his heaven,

      And that great lord, the worm of the red plain,

      Cold in mid sun, strenuous, untameable,

      Coiling his solitary strength along

      Slow century after century, conscious each

      How in the life of his Arch-enemy

      He lives, how ruin of one confounds the pair,—

      Is this the eternal dual mystery?

      One Source of being, Light, or Love, or Lord,

      Whose shadow is the brightness of the world,

      Still let thy dawns and twilights glimmer pure

      In flow perpetual from hill to hill,

      Still bathe us in thy tides of day and night;

      Wash me at will a weed in thy free wave,

      Drenched in the sun and air and surge of Thee.

      THE MORNING STAR

      I

      Backward betwixt the gates of steepest heaven,

      Faint from the insupportable advance

      Of light confederate in the East, is driven

      The starry chivalry, and helm and lance,

      Which held keen ward upon the shadowy plain,

      Yield to the stress and stern predominance

      Of Day; no wanderer morning-moon awane

      Floats through dishevelled clouds, exanimate,

      In disarray, with gaze of weariest pain;

      O thou, sole Splendour, sprung to vindicate

      Night’s ancient fame, thou in dread strife serene,

      With back-blown locks, joyous yet desperate

      Flamest; from whose pure ardour Earth doth win

      High passionate pangs, thou radiant paladin.

      II

      Nay; strife must cease in song: far-sent and clear

      Piercing the silence of this summer morn

      I hear thy swan-song rapturous; I hear

      Life’s ecstasy; sharp cries of flames which burn

      With palpitating joy, intense and pure,

      From altars of the universe, and yearn

      In eager spires;