The Ascent of Man

"Peace on earth and good will unto Men!"
Came the tidings borne o'er wide dominions;
The glad tidings thrilled the world as when
Spring comes fluttering on the west wind's pinions,
When her voice is heard
Warbling through each bird,
And a new-born hope
Throbs through all things infinite in scope.

"Peace on earth and good will!" came the word
Of the Son of Man, the Man of Sorrow—
But the peace turned to a flaming sword,
Turned to woe and wailing on the morrow
When with gibes and scorns,
Crowned with barren thorns,
Gashed and crucified,
On the Cross the tortured Jesus died.

And the world, once full of flower-hung shrines,
Now forsakes old altars for the new,
Zeus grows faint and Venus' star declines
As Jehovah glorifies the Jew,
He whom—lit with awe—
God-led Moses saw,
Graving with firm hand
In his people's heart his Lord's command.

Holding Hells and Heavens in either hand
Comes the priest and comes the wild-eyed prophet,
Tells the people of some happier land,
Terrifies them with a burning Tophet;
Gives them creeds for bread
And warm roof o'erhead,
Gives for life's delight
Passports to the kingdom, spirit-bright.

And the people groaning everywhere
Hearken gladly to the wondrous story,
How beyond this life of toil and care
They shall lead a life of endless glory:
Where beyond the dim
Earth-mists Seraphim,
Love-illumined, wait—
Hierarchies of angels at heaven's gate.

Let them suffer while they live below,
Bear in silence weariness and pain;
For the heavier is their earthly woe,
Verily the heavenlier is their gain
In the mansions where
Sorrow and despair,
Yea, all moan shall cease
With the moan of immemorial seas.

And to save their threatened souls from sin,
Save them from the world, the flesh, the devil,
Men and Women break from bonds of kin
And in cloistered cell draw bar on evil,
Worship on their knees
Sacred Images,
And all Saints above,
The Madonna, mystic Rose of love.

Mystic Rose of Maiden Motherhood,
Moon of Hearts immaculately mild,
Beaming o'er the turbulent times and rude
With the promise of her blessèd Child:
Whom pale Monks adore,
Pining evermore
For the heaven of love
Which their homesick lives are dying of.

But the flame of mystical desires
Turns to fury fiercer than a leopard's,
Holy fagots blaze with kindling fires
As the priests, the people's careful shepherds,
In Heaven's awful name,
Set the pile on flame
Where, for Conscience' sake,
Heretics burn chaunting at the stake.

Subterranean secrets of the prison,
Throbs of anguish in the crushing cell,
Torture-chambers of the Inquisition
Are the Church's antidotes to Hell.
Better rack them here,
Mutilate and sear,
Than their souls should go
To the place of everlasting woe.

And a lurid universal night,
Lit by quenchless fires for unquenched sages,
Thick with spectral broods that shun the light,
Looms impervious o'er the stifled ages
Where the blameless wise
Fall a sacrifice,
Fall as fell of old
The unspotted firstlings of the fold.

And the violent feud of clashing creeds
Shatters empires and breaks realms asunder;
Cities tremble, sceptres shake like reeds
At the swift bolts of the Papal thunder;
Yea, the bravest quail,
Cast from out the pale
Of all Christendom
By the dread anathemas of Rome.

And like one misled by marish gleams
When he hears the shrill cock's note of warning,
Europe, starting from its trance of dreams,
Sees the first streak of the clear-eyed morning
As it broadening stands
Over ravaged lands
Where mad nations are
Locked in grip of fratricidal war.

Castles burn upon the vine-clad knolls,
Huts glow smouldering in the trampled meadows;
And a hecatomb of martyred souls
Fills a queenly town with wail of widows
In those branded hours
When red-guttering showers
Splash by courts and stews
To the Bells of Saint Bartholomew's.

Seed that's sown upon the wanton wind
Shall be harvested in whirlwind rages,
For revenge and hate bring forth their kind,
And black crime must ever be the wages
Of a nation's crime
Time transmits to time,
Till the score of years
Is wiped out in floods of staunchless tears.

Yea, the anguish in a people's life
May have eaten out its heart of pity,
Bred in scenes of scarlet sin and strife,
Heartless splendours of a haughty city;
Dark with lowering fate,
At the massive gate
Of its kings it may
Stand and knock with tragic hand one day.

For the living tomb gives up its dead,
Bastilles yawn, and chains are rent asunder,
Little children now and hoary head,
Man and maiden, meet in joy and wonder;
Throng on radiant throng,
Brave and blithe and strong,
Gay with pine and palm,
Fill fair France with freedom's thunder-psalm.

Free and equal—rid of king and priest—
The rapt nation bids each neighbour nation
To partake the sacramental feast
And communion of the Federation:
And electrified
Masses, far and wide,
Thrill to hope and start
Vibrating as with one common heart.

From the perfumed South of amorous France
With her wreath of orange bloom and myrtle,
From old wizard woods of lost Romance
Soft with wail of wind and voice of turtle,
From the roaring sea
Of grey Normandy,
And the rich champaigns
Where the vine gads o'er Burgundian plains;

From the banks of the blue arrowy Rhone,
And from many a Western promontory,
From volcanic crags of cloven stone
Crowned with castles ivy-green in story;
From gay Gascon coasts
March fraternal hosts,
Equal hosts and free,
Pilgrims to the shrine of liberty.

But king calls on king in wild alarms,
Troops march threatening through the vales and passes,
Barefoot Faubourgs at the cry to arms
On the frontier hurl their desperate masses:
The deep tocsin's boom
Fills the streets with gloom,
And with iron hand
The red Terror guillotines the land.

For the Furies of the sanguine past
Chase fair Freedom, struggling torn and baffled,
Till infuriate—turned to bay at last—
Rolled promiscuous on the common scaffold,
Vengeful she shall smite
A Queen's head bleached white,
And a courtesan's
Whose light hands once held the reins of France.

She shall smite and spare not—yea, her own,
Her fair sons so pure from all pollution,
With their guiltless life-blood must atone
To the goddess of the Revolution;
Dying with a song
On their lips, her young
Ardent children end,
Meeting death even as one meets a friend.

And her daughter, in heroic shame,
Turned to Freedom's Moloch statue, crying:
"Liberty, what crimes done in thy name!"
Spake, and with her Freedom's self seemed dying
As she bleeding lay
'Neath Napoleon's sway:
Europe heard her knell
When on Waterloo the Empire fell.

VI.

Woe, woe to Man and all his hapless brood!
No rest for him, no peace is to be found;
He may have tamed wild beasts and made the ground
Yield corn and wine and every kind of food;
He may have turned the ocean to his steed,
Tutored the lightning's elemental speed
To flash his thought from Ætna to Atlantic;
He may have weighed the stars and spanned the stream,
And trained the fiery force of panting steam
To whirl him o'er vast steppes, and heights gigantic:
But the storm-lashed world of feeling—
Love, the fount of tears unsealing,
Choruses of passion pealing—
Lust, ambition, hatred, awe,
Clashing loudly with the law,
But the phantasms of the mind
Who shall master, yea, who bind!

What help is there without, what hope within
Of rescue from the immemorial strife?
What will redeem him from the spasm of life,
With all its devious ways of shame and sin?
What will redeem him from ancestral greeds,
Grey legacies of hate and hoar misdeeds,
Which from the guilty past Man doth inherit—
The past that is bound up with him, and part
Of the pulsations of his inmost heart,
And of the vital motions of his spirit?
Ages mazed in tortuous errors,
Ghostly fears, and haunting terrors,
Minds bewitched that served as mirrors
For the foulest fancies bred
In a fasting hermit's head,
Such as cast a sickly blight
On all shapes of life and light.

Yea, panting and pursued and stung and driven,
The soul of Man flies on in deep distress,
As once across the world's harsh wilderness
Latona fled, chased by the Queen of heaven;
Flying across the homeless Universe
From the inveterate stroke of Juno's curse;
On whom even mother earth closed all her portals,
Refusing shelter in her cooing bowers,
Or rest upon her velvet couch of flowers,
To the most weary of all weary mortals.
Within whose earth-encumbered form,
Like two fair stars entwined in storm,
Or wings astir within the worm,
Feeling out for light and air,
Struggled that celestial pair,
Phœbus of unerring bow,
And chaste Dian fair as snow.

Ah, who will harbour her? Ah, who will save
The fugitive from pangs that rack and tear;
Who, finding rest nor refuge anywhere,
Seems doomed to be her unborn offspring's grave;
The seed of Jove, murdered before their birth—
Did not the sea, more merciful than earth,
Bid Delos stand—that wandering isle of Ocean—
Stand motionless upon the moving foam,
To be the exile's wave-encircled home,
And lull her pains with leaves in drowsy motion,
Where the soft-boughed olive sighing
Bends above the woman lying
And in spasms of anguish crying,
Shuddering through her mortal frame,
As from dust is struck the flame
Which shall henceforth beam sublime
Through the firmament of Time?

Oh, balmy Island bedded on the brine,
Harbour of refuge on the tumbling seas,
The fabulous bowers of the Hesperides
Ne'er bore such blooming gold as glows in thine:
Thou green Oasis on the tides of Time
Where no rude blast disturbs the azure clime;
Thou Paradise whence man can ne'er be driven,
Where, severed from the world-clang and the roar,
Still in the flesh he yet may reach that shore
Where want is not, and, like the dew from heaven,
There drops upon the fevered soul
The balm of Thought's divine control
And rapt absorption in the whole:
Delivery in the realm of art
Of the world-racked human heart—
Forms and hues and sounds that make
Life grow lovelier for their sake.

By sheer persistence, strenuous and slow,
The marble yields and, line by flowing line
And curve by curve, begins to swell and shine
Beneath the ring of each far-sighted blow:
Until the formless block obeys the hand,
And at the mastering mind's supreme command
Takes form and radiates from each limb and feature
Such beauty as ne'er bloomed in mortal mould,
Whose face, out-smiling centuries, shall hold
Perfection's mirror up to 'prentice nature.
Not from out voluptuous ocean
Venus rose in balanced motion,
Goddess of all bland emotion;
But she leaped a shape of light,
Radiating love's delight,
From the sculptor's brain to be
Sphered in immortality.

New spirit-yearnings for a heavenlier mood
Call for a love more pitiful and tender,
And 'neath the painter's touch blooms forth in splendour
The image of transfigured motherhood.
All hopes of all glad women who have smiled
In adoration on their first-born child
Here smile through one glad woman made immortal;
All tears of all sad women through whose heart
Has pierced the edge of sorrow's sevenfold dart
Lie weeping with her at death's dolorous portal.
For in married hues whose splendour
Bodies forth the gloom and grandeur
Of life's pageant, tragic, tender,
Common things transfigured flush
By the magic of the brush,
As when sun-touched raindrops glow,
Blent in one harmonious bow.

But see, he comes, Lord of life's changeful shows,
To whom the ways of Nature are laid bare,
Who looks on heaven and makes the heavens more fair,
And adds new sweetness to the perfumed rose;
Who can unseal the heart with all its tears,
Marshal loves, hates, hopes, sorrows, joys, and fears
In quick procession o'er the passive pages;
Who has given tongue to silent generations
And wings to thought, so that long-mouldered nations
May call to nations o'er the abyss of ages:
The poet, in whose shaping brain
Life is created o'er again
With loftier raptures, loftier pain;
Whose mighty potencies of verse
Move through the plastic Universe,
And fashion to their strenuous will
The world that is creating still.

Do you hear it, do you hear it
Soaring up to heaven, or somewhere near it?
From the depths of life upheaving,
Clouds of earth and sorrow cleaving,
From despair and death retrieving,
All triumphant blasts of sound
Lift you at one rhythmic bound
From the thraldom of the ground.

All the sweetness which the glowing
Violets waft to west winds blowing,
All the burning love-notes aching,
Rills and thrills of rapture shaking
Through the hearts that throb to breaking
Of the little nightingales;
Mellow murmuring waters streaming
Lakeward in long silver trails,
Crooning low while earth lies dreaming
To the moonlight-tangled vales;
Swish of rain on half-blown roses
Hoarding close their rich perfume,
Which the summer dawn uncloses
Sparkling in their morning bloom;
Convent peals o'er pastoral meadows,
Swinging through hay-scented air
When the velvet-footed shadows
Call the hind to evening prayer.
Yea, all notes of woods and highlands;
Sea-fowls' screech round sphinx-like islands
Couched among the Hebrides;
Cuckoo calls through April showers,
When the green fields froth with flowers
And with bloom the orchard trees.
Boom of surges with their hollow
Refluent shock from cave to cave,
As the maddening spring tides follow
Moonstruck reeling wave o'er wave.
Yea, all rhythms of air and ocean
Married to the heart's emotion,
To the intervolved emotion
Of the heart for ever turning
In a whirl of bliss and pain,
Blending in symphonious strain
All the vague, unearthly yearning
Of the visionary brain.

All life's discords sweetly blending,
Heights on heights of being ascending,
Harmonies of confluent sound
Lift you at one rhythmic bound
From the thraldom of the ground;
Loosen all your bonds of birth,
Clogs of sense and weights of earth,
Bear you in angelic legions
High above terrestrial regions
Into ampler ether, where
Spirits breathe a finer air,
Where upon world altitudes
God-intoxicated moods
Fill you with beatitudes;
Till no longer cramped and bound
By the narrow human round,
All the body's barriers slide,
Which with cold obstruction hide
The supreme, undying, sole
Spirit struggling through the whole,
And no more a thing apart
From the universal heart
Liberated by the grace
Of man's genius for a space,
Human lives dissolve, enlace
In a flaming world embrace.

A SYMBOL.

Hurrying for ever in their restless flight
The generations of earth's teeming womb
Rise into being and lapse into the tomb
Like transient bubbles sparkling in the light;
They sink in quick succession out of sight
Into the thick insuperable gloom
Our futile lives in flashing by illume—
Lightning which mocks the darkness of the night.

Nay—but consider, though we change and die,
If men must pass shall Man not still remain?
As the unnumbered drops of summer rain
Whose changing particles unchanged on high,
Fixed, in perpetual motion, yet maintain
The mystic bow emblazoned on the sky.

TIME'S SHADOW.

Thy life, O Man, in this brief moment lies:
Time's narrow bridge whereon we darkling stand,
With an infinitude on either hand
Receding luminously from our eyes.
Lo, there thy Past's forsaken Paradise
Subsideth like some visionary strand,
While glimmering faint, the Future's promised land,
Illusive from the abyss, seems fain to rise.

This hour alone Hope's broken pledges mar,
And Joy now gleams before, now in our rear,
Like mirage mocking in some waste afar,
Dissolving into air as we draw near.
Beyond our steps the path is sunny-clear,
The shadow lying only where we are.

THE ASCENT OF MAN.

PART II.

"Love is for ever poor, and so far from being delicate and beautiful, as mankind imagined, he is squalid and withered ... homeless and unsandalled; he sleeps without covering before the doors, and in the unsheltered streets."—Plato.

THE PILGRIM SOUL.

Through the winding mazes of windy streets
Blindly I hurried I knew not whither,
Through the dim-lit ways of the brain thus fleets

A fluttering dream driven hither and thither.—
The fitful flare of the moon fled fast,
Like a sickly smile now seeming to wither,

Now dark like a scowl in the hurrying blast
As ominous shadows swept over the roofs
Where white as a ghost the scared moonlight had passed.

Curses came mingled with wails and reproofs,
With doors banging to and the crashing of glass,
With the baying of dogs and the clatter of hoofs,

With the rush of the river as, huddling its mass
Of weltering water towards the deep ocean,
'Neath many-arched bridges its eddies did pass.

A hubbub of voices in savage commotion
Was mixed with the storm in a chaos of sound,
And thrilled as with ague in shuddering emotion

I fled as the hunted hare flees from the hound.
Past churches whose bells were tumultuously ringing
The year in, and clashing in concord around;

Past the deaf walls of dungeons whose curses seemed clinging
To the tempest that shivered and shrieked in amazement;
Past brightly lit mansions whence music and singing

Came borne like a scent through the close-curtained casement,
To vaults in whose shadow wild outcasts were hiding
Their misery deep in the gloom of the basement.

By vociferous taverns where women were biding
With features all withered, distorted, aghast;
Some sullenly silent, some brutally chiding,

Some reeling away into gloom as I passed
On, on, through lamp-lighted and fountain-filled places,
Where throned in rich temples, resplendent and vast,

The Lord of the City is deafened with praises
As worshipping multitudes kneel as of old;
Nor care for the crowds of cadaverous faces,

The men that are marred and the maids that are sold—
Inarticulate masses promiscuously jumbled
And crushed 'neath their Juggernaut idol of gold.

Lost lives of great cities bespattered and tumbled,
Black rags the rain soaks, the wind whips like a knout,
Were crouched in the streets there, and o'er them nigh stumbled

A swarm of light maids as they tripped to some rout.
The silk of their raiment voluptuously hisses
And flaps o'er the flags as loud laughing they flout

The wine-maddened men they ne'er satiate with kisses
For the pearls and the diamonds that make them more fair,
For the flash of large jewels that fire them with blisses,

For the glitter of gold in the gold of their hair.
They smiled and they cozened, their bold eyes shone brightly
And lightened with laughter, as, lit by the flare

Of the wind-fretted gas-lamps, they footed it lightly,
Or, closely enlacing and bowered in gloom,
With mouth pressed to hot mouth, their parched lips drain nightly

The wine-cup of pleasure red-sealing their doom.
Brief lives like bright rockets which, aridly glowing,
Fall burnt out to ashes and reel to the tomb.

On, on, loud and louder the rough night was blowing,
Shrill singing was mixed with strange cries of despair;
And high overhead the black sky, redly glowing,

Loomed over the city one ominous glare,
As dark yawning funnels from foul throats for ever
Belched smoke grimly flaming, which outraged the air.

On, on, by long quays where the lamps in the river
Were writhing like serpents that hiss ere they drown,
And poplars with palsy seemed coldly to shiver,

On, on, to the bare desert end of the town.
When lo! the wind stopped like a heart that's ceased beating,
And nought but the waters, white foaming and brown,

Were heard as to seaward their currents went fleeting.
But hark! o'er the lull breaks a desolate moan,
Like a little lost lamb's that is timidly bleating

When, strayed from the shepherd, it staggers alone
By tracks which the mountain streams shake with their thunder,
Where death seems to gape from each boulder and stone.

I turned to the murmur: the clouds swept asunder
And wheeled like white sea-gulls around the white moon;
And the moon, like a white maid, looked down in mute wonder

On a boy whose wan eyelids were closed as in swoon.
Half nude on the ground he lay, wasted and chilly,
And torn as with thorns and sharp brambles of June;

His hair, like a flame which at twilight burns stilly,
In a halo of light round his temples was blown,
And his tears fell like rain on a storm-stricken lily

Where he lay on the cold ground, abandoned, alone.
With heart moved towards him in wondering pity,
I tenderly seized his thin hand with my own:

Crying, "Child, say how cam'st thou so far from the city?
How cam'st thou alone in such pitiful plight,
All blood-stained thy feet, with rags squalid and gritty,

A waif by the wayside, unhoused in the night?"
Then rose he and lifted the bright locks, storm driven,
Which flamed round his forehead and clouded his sight,

And mournful as meres on a moorland at even
His blue eyes flashed wildly through tears as they fell.
Strange eyes full of horror, yet fuller of heaven,

Like eyes that from heaven have looked upon hell.
The eyes of an angel whose depths show where, burning
And lost in the pit, toss the angels that fell.

"Ah," wailed he in tones full of agonized yearning,
Like the plaintive lament of a sickening dove
On a surf-beaten shore, whence it sees past returning

The wings of the wild flock fast fading above,
As they melt on the sky-line like foam-flakes in motion:
So sadly he wailed, "I am Love! I am Love!

"Behold me cast out as weed spurned of the ocean,
Half nude on the bare ground, and covered with scars
I perish of cold here;" and, choked with emotion,

Gave a sob: at the low sob a shower of stars
Broke shuddering from heaven, pale flaming, and fell
Where the mid-city roared as with rumours of wars.

"Be these God's tears?" I cried, as my tears 'gan to well.
"Ah, Love, I have sought thee in temples and towers,
In shrines where men pray, and in marts where they sell;

"In tapestried chambers made tropic with flowers,
Where amber-haired women, soft breathing of spice,
Lay languidly lapped in the gold-dropping showers

"Which gladdened and maddened their amorous eyes.
I have looked for thee vainly in churches where beaming
The Saints glowed embalmed in a prism of dyes,

"Where wave over wave the rapt music went streaming
With breakers of sound in full anthems elate.
I have asked, but none knew thee, or knew but thy seeming;

"A mask in thy likeness on high seats of state;
And they bound it with gold, and they crowned it with glory,
This thing they called love, which was bond slave to hate.

"And they bowed down before it with brown heads and hoary,
They worshipped it nightly, loud hymning its praise,
While out in the cold blast, none heeding its story,

"Love staggers, an outcast, with lust in its place."
Love shivered and sighed like a reed that is shaken,
And lifting his hunger-nipped face to my face:

"Nay, if of the world I must needs die forsaken,
Say thou wilt not leave me to dearth and despair.
To thy heart, to thy home, let the exile be taken,

"And feed me and shelter——" "Where, outcast, ah, where?
Like thee I am homeless and spurned of all mortals;
The House of my fathers yawns wide to the air.

"Stalks desolation across the void portals,
Hope lies aghast on the ruinous floor,
The halls that were thronged once with star-browed immortals,

"With gods statue-still o'er the world-whirr and roar,
With fauns of the forest and nymphs of the river,
Are cleft as if lightning had struck to their core.

"The luminous ceilings, where soaring for ever
Dim hosts of plumed angels smoked up to the sky,
With God-litten faces that yearned to the giver

"As vapours of morning the sun draws on high,
Now ravaged with rain hear the hollow winds whistle
Through rifts in the rafters which echo their cry.

"Blest walls that were vowed to the Virgin now bristle
With weeds of sick scarlet and plague-spotted moss,
And stained on the ground, choked with thorn and rank thistle,

"Rots a worm-eaten Christ on a mouldering Cross.
From the House of my fathers, distraught, broken-hearted,
With a pang of immense, irredeemable loss,

"On my wearying pilgrimage blindly I started
To seek thee, oh Love, in high places and low,
And instead of the glories for ever departed,

"To warm my starved life in thy mightier glow.
For I deemed thee a Presence ringed round with all splendour,
With a sceptre in hand and a crown on thy brow;

"And, behold, thou art helpless—most helpless to tender
Thy service to others, who needest their care.
Yea, now that I find thee a weak child and slender,

"Exposed to the blast of the merciless air,
Like a lamb that is shorn, like a leaf that is shaken,
What, Love, now is left but to die in despair?

"For Death is the mother of all the forsaken,
The grave a strait bed where she rocks them to rest,
And sleep, from whose silence they never shall waken,

"The balm of oblivion she sheds on their breast."
Then I seized him and led to the brink of the river,
Where two storm-beaten seagulls were fluttering west,

And the lamplight in drowning seemed coldly to shiver,
And clasping Love close for the leap from on high,
Said—"Let us go hence, Love; go home, Love, for ever;

"For life casts us forth, and Man dooms us to die."
As if stung by a snake the Child shuddered and started,
And clung to me close with a passionate cry:

"Stay with me, stay with me, poor, broken-hearted;
Pain, if not pleasure, we two will divide;
Though with the sins of the world I have smarted,

"Though with the shame of the world thou art dyed,
Weak as I am, on thy breast I'll recover,
Worn as thou art, thou shalt bloom as my bride:

"Bloom as the flower of the World for the lover
Whom thou hast found in a lost little Child."
And as he kissed my lips over and over—

Child now, or Man, was it who thus beguiled?—
Even as I looked on him, Love, waxing slowly,
Grew as a little cloud, floating enisled,

Which spreads out aloft in the blue sky till solely
It fills the deep ether tremendous in height,
With far-flashing snow-peaks and pinnacles wholly

Invisible, vanishing light within light.
So changing waxed Love—till he towered before me,
Outgrowing my lost gods in stature and might.

As he grew, as he drew me, a great awe came o'er me,
And stammering, I shook as I questioned his name;
But gently bowed o'er me, he soothèd and bore me,

Yea, bore once again to the haunts whence I came,
By dark ways and dreary, by rough roads and gritty,
To the penfolds of sin, to the purlieus of shame.

And lo, as we went through the woe-clouded city,
Where women bring forth and men labour in vain,
Weak Love grew so great in his passion of pity
That all who beheld him were born once again.

About This Book

THE ASCENT OF MAN. PART II.

THE ASCENT OF MAN.

PART II.