Selected
Poems
by
Frederick George Scott
A
DREAM OF THE PREHISTORIC
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Naked
and shaggy, they herded at eve by the sound of the
seas,
When the sky and the ocean
were red as with blood from the battle
of God,
And the wind like a monster sped forth with its
feet on the rocks and
the trees,
And the sands of the desert
blew over the waster of the drought-smitten
sod.
Here, mad with the torments of hunger, despairing
they sank to
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| their
rest, |
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Some
crouching alone in their anguish, some gathered
in groups
on the beach;
And with tears almost human the mother looked down
at the babe on
her breast,
And her pain was the germ
of our love, and her cry was the root of
our speech.
Then a cloud from the sunset arose, like a cormorant
gorged with is
prey,
And extended its wings on
the sky till it smothered the stars in |
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| its
gloom. |
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And
ever the famine-worn faces were wet with the wind-carried
spray,
And dimly the voice of the
deep to their ears was a portent of doom.
[Page 42]
And the dawn that rose up on the morrow, appareled
in gold like a
priest,
Through the smoke of the
incense of morning, looked down on a
vision of death;
For the vultures were gathered together and circled
with joy to |
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| their
feast |
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On
hearts that had ceased from their sorrow, and lips
that had yielded
their breath.
Then the ages went by like a dream, and the shore-line
emerged from
the deep,
And the stars as they watched
through the years saw a change on
the face of the earth;
For over the blanket of sand that had covered the
dead in their sleep
Great forests grew up with
their green, and the sources of |
20 |
| rivers
had birth. |
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And
here in the after-times man, the whitefaced and
smooth- handed,
came by,
And he built him a city
to dwell in and temples of prayer to his God;
He filled it with music and beauty, his spirit aspired
to the sky,
While the dead by whose
pain it was fashioned lay under the ground
that he trod.
He wrenched from great Nature her secrets, the stars
in their |
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| courses
he named, |
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He
weighed them and measured their orbits; he harnessed
the horses
of steam;
He captured the lightnings of heaven, the waves
of the ocean he tamed,—
And ever the wonder amazed
him as one that awakes from a dream.
[Page 43]
But under the streets and the markets, the banks
and the temples of
prayer,
Where humanity laboured
and plotted, or loved with an instinct |
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| divine,
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Deep
down in the silence and gloom of the earth that
had shrouded
them there,
Were the fossil remains
of a skull and the bones of what once was
a spine.
Enfolded in darkness for ever, untouched by the
changes above,
And mingled as clay with
the clay which the hands of ages had brought,
Were the hearts in whose furnace of anguish was
smelted the |
35 |
| gold
of our love, |
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And
the brains from whose twilight of instinct has risen
the dawn
of our thought.
But the law, that was victor of old with its heel
on the neck of the brute,
Still tramples our hearts
in the darkness, still grinds down our face
in the dust;
We are sown in corruption and anguish –whose
fingers will gather the
fruit?
Our life is but lent for
a season—for whom do we hold it in |
40 |
| trust?
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In the vault of the sky overhead, in the gulfs that
lie under our feet,
The wheels of the universe
turn, and the laws of the universe blend;
The pulse of our life is in tune with the rhythm
of forces that beat
In the surf of the furthest
star’s sea, and are spent and regathered
to spend. [Page 44]
Yet we trust in the will of the Being whose fingers
have spangled |
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| the
night |
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With
the dust of a myriad worlds, and who speaks in the
thunders
of space;
Though we see not the start or the finish, though
vainly we cry for the
light,
Let us mount in the glory
of manhood and meet the God-Man face
to face. [Page 45] |
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