fightBegins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.
There is no truce to this drawn battle,
Which ends but to begin again;
The drip of blood, the hoarse death-rattle,
The roar of rage, the shriek of pain,
Are rife in fairest grove and dell,
Turning earth's flowery haunts to hell.
A hell of hunger, hatred, lust,
Which goads all creatures here below,
Or blindworm wriggling in the dust,
Or penguin in the Polar snow:
A hell where there is none to save,
Where life is life's insatiate grave.
And in the long portentous strife,
Where types are tried even as by fire,
Where life is whetted upon life
And step by panting step mounts higher,
Apes lifting hairy arms now stand
And free the wonder-working hand.
They raise a light, aërial house
On shafts of widely branching trees,
Where, harboured warily, each spouse
May feed her little ape in peace,
Green cradled in his heaven-roofed bed,
Leaves rustling lullabies o'erhead.
And lo, 'mid reeking swarms of earth
Grim struggling in the primal wood,
A new strange creature hath its birth:
Wild – stammering – nameless – shameless – nude;
Spurred on by want, held in by fear,
He hides his head in caverns drear.
Most unprotected of earth's kin,
His fight for life that seems so vain
Sharpens his senses, till within
The twilight mazes of his brain,
Like embryos within the womb,
Thought pushes feelers through the gloom.
And slowly in the fateful race
It grows unconscious, till at length
The helpless savage dares to face
The cave-bear in his grisly strength;
For stronger than its bulky thews
He feels a force that grows with use.
From age to dumb unnumbered age,
By dim gradations long and slow,
He reaches on from stage to stage,
Through fear and famine, weal and woe
And, compassed round with danger, still
Prolongs his life by craft and skill.
With cunning hand he shapes the flint,
He carves the horn with strange device,
He splits the rebel block by dint
Of effort – till one day there flies
A spark of fire from out the stone:
Fire which shall make the world his own.
And from the clash of warring Nature's strife
Man day by day wins his imperilled life;
For, goaded on by want, he hunts the roe,
Chases the deer, and lays the wild boar low.
In his rude boat made of the hollow trees
He drifts adventurous on the unoared seas,
And, as he tilts upon the rocking tide,
Catches the glistening fish that flash and glide
Innumerably through the waters wide.
He'll fire the bush whose flames shall help him fel
The trunks to prop his roof, where he may dwell
Beside the bubbling of a crystal well,
Sheltered from drenching rains or noxious glare
When the sun holds the zenith. Delving there,
His cumbered wife, whose multifarious toil
Seems never done, breaks the rich virgin soil,
And in the ashes casts the casual seeds
Of feathered grass and efflorescent weeds;
When, as with thanks, the bounteous earth one morn
Returns lush blades of life-sustaining corn.
And while the woman digs and plants, and twines
To precious use long reeds and pliant bines,
He – having hit the brown bird on the wing,
And slain the roe – returns at evening,
And gives his spoil unto her, to prepare
The succulent, wildwood scented, simmering fare,
While with impatient sniffs and eager-eyed
His bronze-limbed children gather to his side.
And, when the feast is done, all take their ease,
Lulled by the sing-song of the evening breeze
And murmuring undertones of many-foliaged trees;
While here and there through rifts of green the sky
Casts its blue glance like an all-seeing eye.
But though by stress of want and poignant need
Man tames the wolf-sprung hound and rearing steed,
Pens up the ram, and yokes the deep-horned ox,
And through wide pastures shepherds woolly flocks;
Though age by age, through discipline of toil,
Man wring a richer harvest from the soil,
And in the grim and still renewing fight
Slays loathly worms and beasts of gruesome might
By the close-knitted bondage of the clan,
Which adding up the puny strength of man
Makes thousands move with one electric thrill
Of simultaneous, energetic will;
Yet still behind the narrow borderland
Where in security he seems to stand,
His apprehensive life is compassed round
By baffling mysteries he cannot sound,
Where, big with terrors and calamities,
The future like a foe in ambush lies:
A muffled foe, that seems to watch and wait
With the Medusa eyes of stony fate. —
Great floods o'erwhelm and ruin his ripening grain,
His boat is shattered by the hurricane,
From the rent cloud the tameless lightning springs —
Heaven's flame-mouthed dragon with a roar of wings —
And fires his hut and simple household things;
Until before his horror-stricken eyes
The stored-up produce of long labour lies,
A
