Classic Poem

In the ghostly virgin forests
Of the windly, grassy west,
Where the squirrel fills the garner,
Where the blue jay builds the nest;

In the never-ending darkness,
In the dense, unbroken wood,
Serpent-bodied, copper-visaged,
Grim the earliest red man stood.

Bending on his bow of ash-tree,
Watching where, on uplands brown,
Lay the great deer of the woodland
That a single shaft brought down.

“Are not these all mine to marshal,
Tree and squirrel, down and deer,
Am I not the latest, lightest,
Swiftest of the creatures here?”

Lightly to his squaw he turned him,
But there blackened on his sight
One huge coil of living darkness,
Like a giant birth of night.

Flashed the rabbits from the burrows,
Whirled the wild fowl from the lake;
Dusky, shapeless, orbed in circles,
Thus it raised its voice and spake:

“Are not all things thine to govern,
Art not thou the lord of dust,
Stronger than the laws that made thee,
Subtler than the powers that trust?

“Grasp the reins of power and passion,
Be as gods are where you stand,
Master pleasure, vengeance, knowledge,
Lo, the fruit is to your hand!”

Stared aloft the wild red giant,
High his painted arms he flung,
Where, amid the tasselled tree-boughs,
Knots of glistening berries swung.

Broke beyond a deafening thunder,
Reeled and bent the rending woods,
And with sound and foam and darkness
Came the desolating floods.

O'er their coming, domed the tempest,
Lightning flare and thunder's yell,
Under them the woods and wigwams
Tumbled hopeless and pell-mell.

Sank the forests, sank the torrents,
And the twain stood hand in hand
In the grey, unbroken circle
Of a bare and level land.