DREAMS AND DUST

SELVES

My dust in ruined Babylon Is blown along the level plain, And songs of mine at dawn have soared Above the blue Sicilian main.

We are ourselves, and not ourselves . . . For ever thwarting pride and will Some forebear's passion leaps from death To claim a vital license still.

Ancestral lusts that slew and died, Resurgent, swell each living vein; Old doubts and faiths, new panoplied, Dispute the mastery of the brain.

The love of liberty that flames From written rune and stricken reed Shook the hot hearts of swordsmen sires At Marathon and Runnymede. What are these things we call our "selves"? . . . Have I not shouted, sobbed, and died In the bright surf of spears that broke Where Greece

rolled back the Persian tide?

Are we who breathe more quick than they Whose bones are dust within the tomb? Nay, as I write, what gray old ghosts Murmur and mock me from the gloom. . . .

They call . . . across strange seas they call, Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time. . . . They startle me with wordless songs To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme.

Our hearts swell big with dead men's hates, Our eyes sting hot with dead men's tears; We are ourselves, but not ourselves, Born heirs, but serfs, to all the years!

I rode with Nimrod . . . strove at Troy . . . A slave I stood in Crowning Tyre, A queen looked on me and I loved And died to compass my desire.

THE WAGES

EARTH loves to gibber o'er her dross, Her golden souls, to waste; The cup she fills for her god-men Is a bitter cup to taste.

Who sees the gyves that bind mankind And strives to strike them off Shall gain the hissing hate of fools, Thorns, and the ingrate's scoff.

Who storms the moss-grown walls of eld And beats some falsehood down Shall pass the pallid gates of death Sans laurel, love or crown;

For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee-- For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane.

IN MARS, WHAT AVATAR?

"In Vishnu-land, what avatar?" --

BROWNING.

PERCHANCE the dying gods of Earth Are destined to another birth, And worn-out creeds regain their worth In the kindly air of other stars-- What lords of life and light hold sway In the myriad worlds of the Milky Way? What avatars in Mars?

What Aphrodites from the seas That lap the plunging Pleiades Arise to spread afar The dream that was the soul of Greece? In Mars, what avatar?

Which hundred moons are wan with love For dull Endymions?

Which hundred moons hang tranced above Audacious Ajalons?

What Holy Grail lures errants pale Through the wastes of yonder star? What fables sway the Milky Way? In Mars, what avatar?

When morning skims with crimson wings Across the meres of Mercury, What dreaming Memnon wakes and sings Of miracles on Mercury? What Christs, what avatars, Claim Mars?

THE GOD-MAKER, MAN

NEVERMORE Shall the shepherds of Arcady follow Pan's moods

as he lolls by the shore Of the mere, or lies hid in the hollow; Nevermore Shall they start at the sound of his reed-fashioned flute;

Fallen mute Are the strings of Apollo, His lyre and his lute; And the lips of the Memnons are mute Evermore; And the gods of the North,--are they dead or forgetful, Our Odin and Baldur and Thor? Are they drunk, or grown weary of worship and fretful, Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?

And into what night have the Orient dieties strayed? Swart gods of the Nile, in dusk splendors arrayed, Brooding Isis and somber Osiris, You were gone ere the fragile papyrus, (That bragged you eternal!) decayed.

The avatars But illumine their limited evens And vanish like plunging stars; They are fixed in the whirling heavens No firmer than falling stars; Brief lords of the changing soul, they pass Like a breath from the face of a glass, Or a blossom of summer blown shallop-like over The clover And tossed tides of grass.

Sink to silence the psalms and the paeans The shibboleths shift, and the faiths, And the temples that challenged the aeons Are tenanted only by wraiths; Swoon to silence the cymbals and psalters, The worships grow senseless and strange,

And the mockers ask, "Where be thy altars?" Crying, "Nothing is changeless--but Change!"

Yes, nothing seems changeless, but Change. And yet, through the creed-wrecking years, One story for ever appears; The tale of a City Supernal-- The whisper of Something eternal-- A passion, a hope, and a vision That peoples the silence with Powers; A fable of meadows Elysian Where Time enters not with his Hours;-- Manifold are the tale's variations, Race and clime ever tinting the dreams, Yet its essence, through endless mutations, Immutable gleams.

Deathless, though godheads be dying, Surviving the creeds that expire, Illogical, reason-defying, Lives that passionate, primal desire; Insistent, persistent, forever Man cries to the silences, Never

Shall Death reign the lord of the soul, Shall the dust be the ultimate

goal-- I will storm the black bastions of Night! I will tread where my vision has trod, I will set in the darkness a light, In the vastness, a god!"

As the forehead of Man grows broader, so do his creeds; And his gods they are shaped in his image, and mirror his needs; And he clothes them with thunders and beauty, he clothes them with music and fire; Seeing not, as he bows by their altars, that he worships his own desire; And mixed with his trust there is terror, and mixed with his madness is ruth, And every man grovels in error, yet every man glimpses a truth.

For all of the creeds are false, and all of the creeds are true; And low at the shrines where my brothers bow, there will I bow, too;

For no form of a god, and no fashion Man has made in his desperate passion But is worthy some worship of mine;-- Not too hot with a gross belief, Nor yet too cold with pride, I will bow me down where my brothers bow, Humble--but open-eyed!

UNREST A FIERCE unrest seethes at the core Of all existing things: It was the eager wish to soar That gave the gods their wings.

From what flat wastes of cosmic slime, And stung by what quick fire, Sunward the restless races climb!-- Men risen out of mire!

There throbs through all the worlds that are This heart-beat hot and strong, And shaken systems, star by star, Awake and glow in song.

But for the urge of this unrest These joyous spheres were mute; But for the rebel in his breast Had man remained a brute.

When baffled lips demanded speech, Speech trembled into birth-- (One day the lyric word shall reach From earth to laughing earth)--

When man's dim eyes demanded light The light he sought was born-- His wish, a Titan, scaled the height And flung him back the morn!

From deed to dream, from dream to deed, From daring hope to hope, The restless wish, the instant need, Still lashed him up the slope!

. . . . . .

I sing no governed firmament, Cold, ordered, regular-- I sing the stinging discontent That leaps from star to star!

THE PILTDOWN SKULL

WHAT was his life, back yonder In the dusk where time began, This beast uncouth with the jaw of an ape And the eye and brain of a man?-- Work, and the wooing of woman, Fight, and the lust of fight, Play, and the blind beginnings Of an Art that groped for light?--

In the wonder of redder mornings, By the beauty of brighter seas, Did he stand, the world's first thinker, Scorning his clan's decrees?-- Seeking, with baffled eyes, In the dumb, inscrutable skies, A name for the greater glory That only the dreamer sees?

One day, when the afterglows, Like quick and sentient things,

With a rush of their vast, wild wings, Rose out of the shaken ocean As great birds rise from the sod, Did the shock of their sudden splendor Stir him and startle and thrill him, Grip him and shake him and fill him With a sense as of heights untrod?-- Did he tremble with hope and vision, And grasp at a hint of God?

London stands where the mammoth Caked shag flanks with slime-- And what are our lives that inherit The treasures of all time? Work, and the wooing of woman, Fight, and the lust of fight, A little play (and too much toil!) With an Art that gropes for light; And now and then a dreamer, Rapt, from his lonely sod Looks up and is thrilled and startled With a fleeting sense of God!

THE SEEKER

THE creeds he wrought of dream and thought Fall from him at the touch of life, His old gods fail him in the strife-- Withdrawn, the heavens he sought!

Vanished, the miracles that led, The cloud at noon, the flame at night; The vision that he wing'd and sped Falls backward, baffled, from the height;

Yet in the wreck of these he stands Upheld by something grim and strong; Some stubborn instinct lifts a song And nerves him, heart and hands:

He does not dare to call it hope;-- It is not aught that seeks reward-- Nor faith, that up some sunward slope Runs aureoled to meet its

lord;

It touches something elder far Than faith or creed or thought in man, It was ere yet these lived and ran Like light from star to star;

It touches that stark, primal need That from unpeopled voids and vast Fashioned the first crude, childish creed,-- And still shall fashion, till the last!

For one word is the tale of men: They fling their icons to the sod, And having trampled down a god They seek a god again!

Stripped of his creeds inherited, Bereft of all his sires held true, Amid the wreck of visions dead He thrills at touch of visions new. . . .

He wings another Dream for flight. . . . He seeks beyond the outmost dawn A god he set there and, anon, Drags that god from the

height!

. . . . . .

But aye from ruined faiths and old That droop and die, fall bruised seeds; And when new flowers and faiths unfold They're lovelier flowers, they're kindlier creeds.

THE AWAKENING

THE steam, the reek, the fume, of prayer Blown outward for a million years, Becomes a mist between the spheres, And waking Sentience struggles there.

Prayer still creates the boon we pray; And gods we've hoped for, from those hopes Will gain sufficient form one day And in full godhood storm the slopes Where ancient Chaos, stark and gray, Already trembles for his sway.

When that the restless worlds would fly Their wish created rapid wings, But not till aeons had passed by With dower of many idler things; And when dumb flesh demanded speech Speech struggled to the lips at last;-- Now the unpeopled Void, and vast,

Clean to that uttermost blank beach Whereto the boldest thought may reach That voyages from the vaguest past-- (Dim realm and ultimate of space)-- Is vexed and troubled, stirs and shakes, In prescience of a god that wakes, Born of man's wish to see God's face!

The endless, groping, dumb desires,-- The climbing incense thick and sweet, The lovely purpose that aspires, The wraiths of vapor wing'd and fleet That rise and run with eager feet Forth from a myriad altar fires: All these become a mist that fills The vales and chasms nebular; A shaping Soul that moves and thrills The wastes between red star and star!

A SONG OF MEN

OUT of the soil and the slime, Reeking, they climb, Out of the muck and the mire, Rank, they aspire;

Filthy with murder and mud, Black with shed blood, Lust and passion and clay-- Dying, they slay;

Stirred by vague hints of a goal, Seeking a soul! Groping through terror and night Up to the light: Life in the dust and the clod Sensing a God;

Flushed of the glamor and gleam Caught from a dream; Stained of the struggle and toil, Stained of the soil, Ally of God in the end-- Helper and friend--

Hero and prophet and priest Out of the beast!

THE NOBLER LESSON

CHRIST was of virgin birth, and, being slain, The creedists say, He rose from death again. Oh, futile age-long talk of death and birth!-- His life, that is the one thing wonder-worth; Not how He came, but how He lived on earth. For if gods stoop, and with quaint jugglery Mock nature's laws, how shall that profit thee?-- The nobler lesson is that mortals can Grow godlike through this baffled front of man!

AT LAST

EACH race has died and lived and fought for the "true" gods of that poor race, Unconsciously, divinest thought of each race gild- ing its god's face. And every race that lives and dies shall make itself

some other gods, Shall build, with mingled truth and lies, new icons from the world-old clods. Through all the tangled creeds and dreams and shifting shibboleths men hold The false-and-true, inwoven, gleams: a matted mass of dross and gold. Prove, then, thy gods in thine own soul; all others' gods, for thee, are vain; Nor swerved be, struggling for the goal, by bribe of joy nor threat of pain.

As skulls grow broader, so do faiths; as old tongues die, old gods die, too,

And only ghosts of gods and wraiths may meet the backward- gazer's view. Where, where the faiths of yesterday? Ah, whither vanished, whither gone? Say, what Apollos drive to-day adown the flaming slopes of dawn? Oh, does the blank past hide from view forgotten Christs, to be reborn, The future tremble where some new Messiah- Memnon sings the morn? Of all the worlds, say any earth, like dust wind- harried to and fro, Shall give the next Prometheus birth; but say-- at last--you do not know.

How should I know what dawn may gleam beyond the gates of darkness there?-- Which god of all the gods men dream? Why should I whip myself to care? Whichever over all hath place hath shaped and made me what I am; Hath made me strong to front his face, to dare to question though he damn.

Perhaps to cringe and cower and bring a shrine a forced and faithless faith Is far more futile than to fling your laughter in the face of Death. For writhe or whirl in dervish rout, they are not flattered there on high, Or sham belief to hide a doubt--no gods are mine that love a lie! Nor gods that beg belief on earth with portents that some seer foretells-- Is life itself not wonder-worth that we must cry for miracles? Is it not strange enough we breathe? Does every- thing not God reveal? Or must we ever weave and wreathe some creed that shall his face conceal? Some creed of which its prophets cry it holds the secret's all-in-all: Some creed which ever bye and bye doth crumble, totter, to its fall! Say any dream of all the dreams that drift and darkle, glint and glow, Holds most of truth within its gleams; but say

--at last--you do not know.

Oh, say the soul, from star to star, with victory wing'd, leap on through space And scale the bastioned nights that bar the secret's inner dwelling-place; Or say it ever roam dim glades where pallid wraiths of long-dead moons Flit like blown feathers through the shades, borne on the breath of sobbing tunes: Say any tide of any time, of all the tides that ebb and flow, Shall buoy us on toward any clime; but say--at last--you do not know!