Classic Poem

I.

And this the Cause! and here all life began!
Primordial stomach, in the tadpole found,
Thy leather bottle was the type, the plan,
Which Nature worked on when she moulded man;
Ere Adam made a track upon the ground.

II.

I thought it strange that nothing touched the chord
Of natural feeling when, perchance, I saw
My grandsire of the woods, baboon abhorred;
Yea, truly, as a creature of the Lord
I loved him better than by Nature's law.

III.

Did something queer about this mute freemason
Hint trouble on his own side of the question —
Frog, lizard, newt, from whom by variation
Came our four-handed, nimble poor relations,
Made odious to us by too much suggestion?

IV.

But this small mollusk, this half-inch ellipse!
I only smile to think of native man
Drifting about, attached to weeds and chips,
Till a high tide, in cyclone or eclipse,
Left on some rock the future Caliban.

V.

'Tis not, I grant, a question of chronology;
Form loved by Nature! in its oval curves
She hides the secrets of her dim biology;
Seeds, eggs, and worlds, and facts in physiology
Point to a purpose that the shape subserves.

VI.

Nearer the cause, the simpler, forms are found,
And hold! Ascidians older than marine;
Why stop at ape or oyster? — to the ground
Of life organic let the plummet sound
A man I am — a vegetable have been.

VII.

Nature leaps nothing — on the word of sages,
Which no one dares (though he may not as they do,
Evolve the world through many thousand ages
While form from form its embryo disengages)
Looking a Zoophyte in the face say nay to.

VIII.

Thy phyton simplest, lowest form is seen
Down in the rocks, through all the ages gray;
Dim shadowy bulb! since in thy tender green
My germ I saw, no slimy thing obscene,
Nor hairy monster, fills me with dismay.

IX.

Ringed, rib-nosed, howlers, climbers, ugly links
In nature's chain, would more of you were missed;
One fact would still remain the Man who thinks
Began his being in the Man who drinks,
The infant Mammal — here I must desist.

X.

I call them links — they are in fact but kinks;
The true link is most perfect in each kind
Of what it joins, and never blurs or sinks
The one kind in the others, a true sphinx,
Both and yet neither, medely undefined.

XI.

And is there such a link? and is this he,
With hooked hands and feet and devilish tail
By travellers seen disporting on a tree,
By me, sometimes, oh, horror! in a spree?
I tremble at the thought, my spirits fail.

XII.

Avaunt, begone, thou fearful ape and brother,
Batrachian, polyp, any form but thine,
I would say swine or dog, or any other,
But for some slight respect I owe thy mother,
Of distant kin, through that first bulb, to mine.

XIII.

The onion is not meant, but let that pass,
Though Egypt worshipped it with Thot and Pthah, —
Bulbous in form I mean, in substance grass;
And such is man, and such, to man and ass,
Ascidium N. distillitoria.

XIV.

The Autocthones sprang up with Attic mint,
And he whom attic-bards still build upon,
The sage who said it was a heart of flint
That could eat beans, beheld, he seems to hint,
His grandam in a dicotyledon .

XV.

Organic life, he means, is that perfected
Which in a single cell or thread begins;
The simple stomach in the sponge detected,
By much selection into man erected,
Becomes a thing that walks and talks and sins.

XVI.

But great Ascidian, vegetable bottle
Aught might I venerate it would be thee;
The thirsty ape who held thee by the throttle
Could know no more than I, or Aristotle,
He held the father of all apes, and me.

XVII.

Capacious pitcher-plant, I see thee now,
Thy fair round stomach bibulous of dew;
And I a stomach, bibulous as thou,
A walking stomach, which, I must avow,
A moist night often fills, like thine, anew.

XVIII.

See here the spheric form by Nature loved,
See here the centre of the human frame!
By correlation altered and improved,
Through hairy generations, far removed,
Till hardly Science knows it for the same.

XIX.

Life from a leaf? and does that seem too low?
The Bible says our origin was dust;
And dust is dry, and I am dry, and so
A clear case of reversion; but you know
We give such stories up to " Dryasdust. "

XX.

Dodona's talking tree, and that of Polo —
Was it of our " arboreal " sire a fable?
(But if he speaks, we know 'tis strictly solo,)
Or did it hint of " library " and " folio "
And thought impressed on matter vegetable.

XXI.

But back from our digression; though we could,
With high example, follow this suggestion
From " bark " and " leaf " into the very wood,
Of which so many heads are made as should
Put man's botanic origin out of question.

XXII.

Plato knew something of the soul and he
Had motives for the region where he placed it
And Nature errs, Nepenthes, or I see
A rudimental abdomen in thee,
Or first rude sketch with which her hand prefaced it.

XXIII.

Life without brain is found — but stomach, never,
The Soul means Life, as that old trifler knew,
And life is in the lowest form that ever
Possessed a paunch, or made its first endeavor
To drink the rain-drop, or distil the dew.

XXIV.

As life, to change the formula, is thirst ;
Earth drinks the sky and the sky drinks the sea
Buds drink the dew, and germs with moisture burst,
And the old mosses, arid as at first,
Hang out their stomachs upon rock and tree.

XXV.

Nay, stunning thought! the now Ascidian race
Must grow to mew by constant evolution,
And fish, or phyton, sitting in our place
Will hob-a-nob with quite as good a grace,
About the world's ten millionth revolution.

XXVI.

Startling discovery! Rabelais touched thy bound;
The Holy Bottle to which pilgrims went
With questions deep, and in its gurgling sound
" Trink, trink " all first and final causes found,
What question but the great Ascidian meant.

XXVII.

See everywhere unconscious imitation,
Vase, pitcher, jug — which (sure as man is hay
And by reversion feels a foolish passion
For flowers and weeds) was not in its first fashion
Fitted with handles, nor yet made of clay.

XXVIII.

Well? — Adam, I suppose was an exception
We'll class him, if you like, with fictile pottery,
But the Ascidian, in its first conception,
Lived, male and female, long ere Eve's deception
Had proved that wives are not , alas! " a lottery. "

XXIX.

The tale 'tis now the fashion to gloss over;
But mark how life is bound up with a tree!
And that old reptile — viewed by a philosopher,
Was, in some age, all grown with fossil moss over,
A bottled imp, or loose fish, in the sea.

XXX.

And mark — with Science came the sense of shame,
For truth is naked, as at first were we;
Let Science blush, let fools her rashness blame,
But Homo bibax , by that oldest name,
Drink to the great Ascidian with me!