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1895
IN the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage | |
| For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt; | |
| I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man, | |
| And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt. | |
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| Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring | 5 |
| Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove; | |
| And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg | |
| Were about me and beneath me and above. | |
| |
| But a rival of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré— | |
| ’Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell. | 10 |
| And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart | |
| Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle. | |
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| Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full, | |
| And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong; | |
| And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead, | 15 |
| “For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.” | |
| |
| But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came, | |
| And he told me in a vision of the night:— | |
| “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, | |
| “And every single one of them is right!” * * * * * | 20 |
| Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me | |
| Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail; | |
| And I stepped beneath Time’s finger, once again a tribal singer, | |
| And a minor poet certified by Traill. | |
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| Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow, | 25 |
| When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn; | |
| When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses, | |
| And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne. | |
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| Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage, | |
| Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk; | 30 |
| Still we let our business slide—as we dropped the half-dressed hide— | |
| To show a fellow-savage how to work. | |
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| Still the world is wondrous large,—seven seas from marge to marge— | |
| And it holds a vast of various kinds of man; | |
| And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, | 35 |
| And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban. | |
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| Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose | |
| And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:— | |
| “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, | 35 |
| And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!” | |
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