Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A COSMIC HISTORY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Come then, poor worm at war with fate
Last Line: Drives in the night the iron hail.
Alternate Author Name(s): Myers, Frederic
Subject(s): Cosmology


COME then, poor worm at war with Fate,—
(What inward Voice spake stern and low?)
Come, paltry Life importunate,
Enough of truth thou too shalt know;
Since man's self-stirred out-reaching thought
Hath seen in vision sights of awe;
Hath from a darker Sinai brought
Damnations of a vaster Law.

From dust, they told thee, man was born?—
The Cosmos' self from dust began,
In days that knew not eve nor morn,
Nor brooding Spirit nor breathing man;
See first-begot from Nought and Night
The gathering swarms, the flamy gale!
That cold, that low, that fitful light
Showed in the void an iron hail.

Then lone in space the comet hung;
Then waxed the whorls of cloudy glow;
Then each on other swept and swung
Enormous eddies, formless flow;
One Law, one Force and manifold,
Bestrewed high heaven with sparkling fire,
Burned in Orion's belt of gold,
And lit the Dragon and the Lyre.

Cooled the great orbs, and whirling flew
Their planet-offspring outward thrown;
On wheeling planets strangely blew
A breath unbidden and unknown;
No Mind creating watched alone,
Nor bade the emergent minds begin;
To weltering waters, senseless stone,
The seed of Life had entered in.

And first a glimmering ease they had,
And creatures bound in dream benign,
Obscurely sentient, blindly glad,
Felt the dim lust of shower and shine;
Then works the unresting Power, and lo!
In subtler chain those germs combine,
Thro' age-long struggle shaping slow
This trembling Self, this Soul of thine.
Rash striving into sad estate!
From anguished brutes the plaint began,
Sighed in man's soul articulate,
And breathes from Beings more than man;—
Ye have called them good, ye have called them great,
But whom have these for hope or prayer?
Nay, with what cry their end await
But silence and a God's despair?

Ye have called them gods, ye have called them kings;—
Too well their impotence they know,
Forth-gazing on the waste of things
With stern philosophies of woe:
Isled in their Sirius, Titan-strong,
They watch his warmth how slowly fail;
He fades, he freezes; long and long
Drives on the dead the iron hail.

Then all is silence; all in one
The exhausted orbs have crashed and sped;
Cold to the core is every sun,
And every heart that loved is dead:
The Night of Brahm lies deep and far,
The Night of Brahm, the enduring gloom;
One black, one solitary star,
The Cosmos is the cosmic tomb.

Nor yet thereby one whit destroyed,
Nor less for all that life's decay,
Thro' the utter darkness, utter void,
Sweeps the wild storm its ancient way:
Still fresh the stones on stones are hurled;
Their soulless armies shall not fail;—
Beyond the dooms of world and world
Drives in the night the iron hail.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net