Edwin Markham

“ The stars to look our way and honor us.
The color of the ground was in him, the red earth;
The tang and odor of the primal things—
The rectitude and patience of the rocks;
The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;
The courage of the bird that dares the sea;
The justice of the rain that loves all leaves;
The pity of the snow that hides all scars;
2The loving-kindness of the wayside well;
The tolerance and equity of light
That gives as freely to the shrinking weed
As to the great oak flaring to the wind—
To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn
That shoulders out the sky. ”

“ Peers into the face of Privilege and cries,
“Why are you halting in the path of man?
Is it your shoulder bears the human load?
Do you draw down the rains of the sweet heaven,
And keep the green things growing? Back to hell!”
God is descending from eternity,
And all things, good and evil, build the road.
Yea, down in the thick of things, the men of greed
Are thumping the inhospitable clay.
By wondrous toils the men without the Dream,
Led onward by a something unawares,
Are laying the foundations of the Dream,
The Kingdom of Fraternity foretold. ”

“ And trees, they have no private ends,
But stand together as close friends.
They send their beauty on all things,
An equal gift to clowns and kings.
50They worry not: there is enough
Laid by for them of God’s good stuff—
Enough for all, and so no fear
Sends boding on their blameless cheer.
So from the field comes curious news—
That each one takes what it can use—
Takes what its lifted arms can hold
Of sky-sweet rain and beamy gold;
And all give back with pleasure high
Their riches to the sun and sky. ”

“ Of bended barley in the quiet breeze;
As faithful as the never-failing Earth
That gives us bread of rest and bread of mirth;
As patient as the rocks that have been still
Since put into their places on the hill;
In league with Earth and all her quiet things,
Whose lives are wrapped in shade and whisperings;
In league with Earth and all the things that live
To give their toil for others and forgive.
Pausing to let the hush of evening pass
Across the soul, as shadow over grass,
They cease their day-long sacrament of toil,
That living prayer, the tilling of the soil! ”

“ It breaks as a hush on the soul in the wonder of youth;
And the lyrical dream of the boy is the kingly truth.
The world is a vapor, and only the Vision is real—
Yea, nothing can hold against Hell but the Wingèd Ideal. ”

“ Haste, O people: all are bidden—
Haste from places, high or hidden:
In Mary’s Child the Kingdom comes, the heaven in beauty bends!
He has made all life completer:
He has made the Plain Way sweeter,
For the stall is His first shelter and the cattle His first friends.
95He has come! the skies are telling:
He has quit the glorious dwelling;
And first the tidings came to us, the humble shepherd folk. ”

“ Whether in deed or in dream I go;
Whether I was in that other sky
Only a dream-moth straying by;
Or whether that world was the world of truth
And this one only a dream forsooth;
Whether perchance for a little span
A moth is not dreaming itself a man!
36 Our Deathless Dead
How shall we honor them, our Deathless Dead? ”

“ A bringer of the tidings of the stars,
News of the forces and the frame of things.
Be to the poet, leagued with Death and Eld,
A Memnon whisper of the Mystery,
Life’s lofty joy and immemorial grief.
Be to the calm historian a glass
Where, through the rush of phantoms, he can see
The majesty and quietness of Truth,
The craft of God, the lure and threat of Time.
86Hail, Titan, with the hair upon your breast!
Be terrible in battle to throw down
The stronghold of the traitors and their crew.
Flash down the sky-born lightnings of the Pen;
Let loose the cramped-up thunders of the Types. ”

“ For youth is looking through his eyes.
Pale listener at the heart of things,
He hears the voices and the wings:
He hears the skylark overhead—
Hears the far footfalls of the dead.
When the swift Muses seize their child,
Then God has gladness rich and wild;
For when the bard is caught and hurled,
A splendor breaks across the world. ”

“ Elizabeth of Hungary
I think of that friend of the people that lady of long ago,
That high-born dame of Hungary who felt the common woe—
Who loved the work-worn multitude whose pillow is a stone,
And felt beat in upon her heart their sorrow as her own.
She bent to lift, for in her blood ran some heroic strain
Of simple serving majesty strayed down from Charlemagne.
Queen of a hundred legends, star of a misty past,
While cities rise and cities fade, her memory will last. ”

“ That Greed’s blind hammers forge about the earth.
I have descended from the Hidden Place,
To make dumb spirits speak and dead feet start:
I feel the wind of battles in my face,
I hear the song of nations in my heart. ”

“ The rose-odor thickens—the deep gorge narrows;
Now the herd takes down through the scented dells.
Speed, speed, leave the brooks to their potter and prattle;
Sweep on with the thunder and surge of the cattle,
The hurry, the voices, the keen joy of battle—
The hills and the wind and the open light.
Now on into camp by the sycamores yonder;
77Now o’er the guitar let the light fingers wander;
Let thoughts in the high heart grow pensive and fonder;
Then stars and the dream of a summer night.
78 Song of the Fay
My life is a dream, a dream,
In the moon’s cool beam ”

“ When she quakes at the thought of the snows;
I count the blown leaves of the Fall,
And I comfort them all.
79Sometimes I awake with a start
In the song of a poet’s heart.
Some day I shall know life whole—
Shall suffer and find me a soul.
80 The World-Purpose
Men sadly say that Love’s high dream is vain,
That one force holds the heart—the hope of gain. ”

“ With untried tendons, cramped in all her length,
Chafing in snowy lair, dreams of the hour
When she shall loose on Earth her hairy strength.
And Germany, whose blonde intrepid might
Once sent her Saxon fire on every land,
Hears the great Labor Angel down the night,
Crying, “Behold, my judgments are at hand!”
And elder kingdoms by the Midland Sea,
Whose every crag has burned with battle fire,
52Feel the young pulses of the days to be,
And hear far voices call them to aspire. ”

“ Hears through the roar of mortal things
The God’s immortal whisperings;
Sees the world-wonder rise and fall,
And knows that Beauty made it all.
He walks the circle of the sun,
And sees the bright Powers laugh and run.
He feels the motion of the sphere,
And builds his song in sacred fear.
He finds the faithful witness hid
In poppy-head and Pyramid.
The Golden Heaven or the Pit—
He shakes the music out of it.
All things yield up their souls to him
From dateless dust to seraphim.
121 The Hindered Guest
Friar Hilary, of Barbizon,
(Rest to his soul where his soul has gone!) ”

“ High into the steeps where the gray chaparral is;
It is he that leads to the low lagoon.
Where the wild mustard splashes the slope with yellow,
He has turned at bay—ah, the powerful fellow!
See the toss of his head—hear the breath and the bellow;
How he tears the ground with his angry hoofs!
Now he breaks a wild path through the deep, plumy rushes,
(A loud bird high on a tamarack hushes)
Right on through a glory of crimson he crushes,
On into the gloom under leafy roofs.
76Oh, the joy of the wind in our faces! We follow
The cattle—we shout down the poppy-hung hollow. ”

“ High sibylline scrolls, sang to the Sceptered Powers:
“The sun ascends in man, the sky expands;
Into the Comrade-Future climb the Hours.
27“The dawn was loud with thunders, white with levin,
Walled by the whirlwind, dark with agèd wrong;
Then came the bright steps of the Lyric Seven,
And heights and depths grew resonant with song.
“Above the dead the circling music sprang—
Dead custom, dead religion, dead desire;
Down the keen wind of dawn the rapture rang,
White with new dream and shot with Shelley’s fire. ”

“ Who knows the glad business afoot on the by-way?
Who know the bold hopes sent adrift on the skyway?
98 Song’s Eternity
Into the song of the Poet are builded the things that endure:
The Pillars of Karnak will crumble but the song of Shelley is sure.
It will hold through the ages of ages, like the heavens steadied in air:
The hoofs that trample the kingdoms down that miracle must spare. ”

“ Will hurl Gray Privilege from the place of power.
These are the inevitable steps that make
Unreason tremble and Tradition shake.
This is the World-Will climbing to its goal,
The climb of the unconquerable Soul—
Democracy whose sure insurgent stride
Jars kingdoms to their ultimate stone of pride. ”

“ There is a destiny that makes us brothers:
None goes his way alone:
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back into our own.
I care not what his temples or his creeds,
One thing holds firm and fast—
That into his fateful heap of days and deeds
The soul of a man is cast. ”

“ With prattle of the tidings from Jerusalem and Rome;
But sweet Elizabeth, her thoughts were not so far from home.
In spite of rosy radiance, in spite of trumpet calls,
The Sorrow of the People sent its shadow through the walls.
108For sitting there beside her lord a sudden silence came
Upon her soul, and all the voices and the horn’s acclaim
Died; and the glowing pageant broke and faded into air,
And only the faces of the poor whose tables are so bare
Pressed in upon her soul that night, pressed in that gala night ”

“ At her light touch, behold! a voice proceeds
Out of all things to chide our sordid deeds;
A beauty breaks, a beauty ever strange,
The Changeless that is back of all the change.
Lightly it comes as when a rose would be—
Takes feature yet remains a mystery.
59 On Seeing Vedder’s “Pleiades”
I hear a burst of music on the night! ”

“ Who stretched out the splendor of things,
And gave to my bird the cool green sod,
A sky, and a venture of wings.
But why are my brothers so still?
They are building a lordly hall—
They are building a palace there on the hill,
But there’s never a song in it all!
40 The Angelus
Suggested by Millet’s painting with this title
Far through the lilac sky the Angelus bell
Brings back again the hail of Gabriel.
Its refluent, three-fold, immemorial rhyme
Follows the fading sun, from clime to clime—
Ripples and lives a moment in the heart,
Wherever the dark hours come and the bright depart. ”

“ Ages ere Tadmor or the man of Uz.
53‘Tis yours to bear the World-State in your dream,
To strike down Mammon and his brazen breed,
To build the Brother-Future, beam on beam;
Yours, mighty one, to shape the Mighty Deed.
The armèd heavens lean down to hear your fame,
America: rise to your high-born part!
The thunders of the sea are in your name,
The splendors and the terrors in your heart.
54 Love’s To-Morrow
For Florence Sharon
Ease of heart or ache of heart,
Tell me, Love, the thing to be:
Flower of dream or dust of dream,
You can choose the one for me. ”

“ Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. ”

“ Are startled by his thunders. The World-Powers
Crowd round to be the lackeys of the king.
His hand has torn the veil of the Great Law,
The law that was before the worlds—before
68That far First Whisper on the ancient deep,
The law that swings Arcturus on the North,
And hurls the soul of man upon the way.
But what avail, O builders of the world,
Unless ye build a safety for the soul?
Man has put harness on Leviathan,
And hooks in his incorrigible jaws ”

“ And lure of baleful beauty in her eyes.
“It is the hour of man: new Purposes,
Broad-shouldered, press against the world’s slow gate;
And voices from the vast eternities
Still preach the soul’s austere apostolate.
33“Always there will be vision for the heart,
The press of endless passion: every goal
A traveler’s tavern, whence he must depart
On new divine adventures of the soul.”
34 Which Was Dream?
Suggested by an ancient Chinese classic
I thought that I dreamed a dream one night—
That I was a moth on a joyous flight,
Under a sky the west wind cools,
Over a sky of fields and pools. ”

“ Then valiant Wolfram in his turn upstarted with a cry:
110“Drink to Archangel Michael, that good fighter in the sky,
That prince of God that all the hosts of Satan could not tame!”
Up to their feet the feasters sprang at that great angel’s name.
Clinking their cups from side to side, they made, in the torches’ flare,
The sign of the cross with their jewelled cups high flashing in the air.
Now cried the duke: “Not all the saints have felt the wind of death;
Come, drink to one who walks the Earth, my wife Elizabeth ”

“ God’s sure hand presses to a blessèd end.
30“So man is climbing toward the Secret Vast—
Up through the storm of stars, skies upon skies;
And down through circling atoms, nearing fast
The brink of things, beyond which Chaos lies. ”

“ Now stirred, now still with dream of things to be.
28“She drew all faces as a lighted tower,
Strong mother of men, molded of lion race;
And all men’s hearts were shaken by her power,
The strange, disturbing beauty of her face.
“New seeing came upon the eyes of men,
New life ran pulsing in the veins of Earth:
It was a sifting of the souls again,
The weighing of the ages and their worth. II
“Man burst the chains that his own hands had made ”

“ And sworn to know the truth of things at last,
Knelt at the altar of the Naked Fact.
“One mighty gleam, and old horizons broke!
All the vast, glimmering outline of the Whole
Swam on the vision, shifting, at one stroke,
The ancient gravitation of the soul.
“All things came circling in one cosmic dance,
One motion older than the ages are ”