Classic Poem

(An Ode of Immortality)

I

O, ribbed and riveted with iron and steel,
Cuirassed and byrnied, breathing smoke and flame,
Cleaving the billows with her monstrous keel,
A Titan challenging the gods she came!
The surf piled lilies round her eager prow,
The wind made music through her mighty spars,
Her hot heart thudded, thundered, and her brow
Had converse with the stars.

II

What phantoms of what famous ships of old
Came to convoy
Her freight of joy,
Her beauty, and her splendour, o'er the main!
Here rocked the weather-beaten barques of Troy
Beside the ghostly galleons of Spain;
And there the Argo , with her fleece of gold,
Followed the Mayflower with her pilgrims bold;
And yonder, with her motley tattered crew,
Santa Maria o'er the surges flew
On buoyant wing;
While Viking warriors, with eyes of blue,
Lay on their oars and wondered at the Thing, —
At the prodigious panoply of steel,
The pounding rods, the whirling blades, the invulnerable keel.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

III

Why does Death's laughter jangle in the dark?
What can he do against so brave a barque?
Louder than any laughter is her speech:
Ten thousand miles her utterance can reach;
And like ten thousand Argus eyes agaze,
Her mast-lights glimmer and her portholes blaze.
So mightily her turbines whirl and whir,
Great cables she can snap like gossamer;
And tempests move her, but as breathings stir
The branches of a forest. Who would seek
To grapple with the giant strength of her
Must have for battle-axe a mountain spur,
Must have a poniard like a mountain peak.

IV

Yea, but an icy mountain is unloosed:
Riding the sea, it cometh to the joust,
Reckless and ruthless, arrogant and proud,
Clad in white armour, visored with a cloud.
No bugles blow, no trumpets blare,
No oriflammes and pennons flare,
No heralds at the lists proclaim
The great grim Arctic giant's name;
But pitiless, and gaunt, and white,
It tilts in silence through the night.
O sea! O wind!
Can God be blind!
Crash! we can hear its great spear gride,
Gashing the vessel's iron side!

V

Ah! woe is me! A host of men must die,
A host of men must leave the April sky,
The lush green meadows, and the budding trees,
The little children climbing on their knees,
Glorious hopes, and golden memories.
And yet to great and good things seemed they born,
For every morn
The sun came through the gateways of the East
To lackey at their feast,
And they had made the tempests, and the waves,
And steel and steam,
And fire and dream,
Their feudatories, and their slaves.
Why should they lie now in such lonely graves?
Why did inexorable Fate ordain
That heart and brain
Should perish in this moaning pool of pain,
This weltering, wailing maelstrom, where Despair
Gripped Faith and Courage by the throat and hair?
O white, cold faces, staring at the sky,
Did Love of God not hear you cry?
O poor blind faces pillowed on the ooze,
Why did God choose
That you should tortured die?
Is the Power of God a Dream? Is the Love of God a Lie?

VI

We are but puppets of the mighty Powers
That round the planets, and that light the stars.
Time maketh dust of palaces and towers,
Of faces and of flowers;
Death all our loveliness and beauty mars.
The great fire-hearted world grows red and wroth,
And shrivels up a city like a moth;
It dribbles down its beard in dotard ire,
And buries half a nation in a mire;
It twitches with a palsy, and a town
Is shaken down.
Now from the Pole
The glaciers roll
And bray and grind the mountains into mud;
Now from the deep,
Where the oozes creep,
New mountains bud.
Change, change, for ever change, death, and decay;
All lovely things are born only to pass away.

VII

And yet the Soul, in whom all beings are,
Discerns so deep, foresees so far,
He plans the meadows of a star
Æons before the star is made,
And in the fire
He moulds to His desire
The tiny blossom and the tender blade.
The deeper meaning of these woes
No mortal knows,
Yet in one web the universe is spun,
Out of the Infinite the finite grows,
Shadow and sun
Are woven in one,
And every star is needful for a rose.

VIII

Behold! the hands of Fate,
Wise and deliberate,
Most exquisite in art, most prodigal of power,
Shaped to a strange device
The murderous bit of ice
Of a million starry flakes, each perfect as a flower,
Hammering flake to flake
Simply for Beauty's sake.

IX

And we have glimpsed a good,
A meaning issuing thence,
Half-seen, half-understood,
Immortal and immense, —
For we have seen poor mortals die
As only the immortal durst;
And we have heard the deathless cry —
" Women and children first! "
" Women and children first! " The whole world hears;
The cry reverberates adown the years.
A trumpet blast, a trumpet call,
So vibrant that the prison-wall
That bars the vision of Humanity
Sags, totters to its fall, —
So brave and fearless that our spirits see
The Love behind it all.
Yea, in despite of glutted Death we feel
That mightier than the Titan's mighty keel,
Than whirling blade, and flashing piston-rod,
Is Courage leaning on the Love of God.