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An Indian Cowrie

A GENTLE creature grew
Within this cell of pearly blue—
How many centuries ago
No seer can tell us. We can only know
It found life pleasant, moved, and took its ease
By palmy island shores in distant Indian seas.

The world has changed since then!
Tongues have died out; and tribes of men
Have clamoured, and have passed away,
Like crow-flights through the sunset of a day;
No pillar marks where gorgeous cities fell;
But this small speechless life hath left its storied shell.

What matters now to seek
How man in that dim dawn antique
First owned it; whether fisher spread
His snare of palm-tree leaves and baited thread,
Or leaf-girt negress, whistling in her speech,
Gathered an empty husk upon a tangled beach?

It profits not; and yet,
Methinks, some cave-dwarf, carved in jet,
With blubber lips and woolly hair,
Wagged a huge head, as at some Aryan fair,
He bartered for a shred, a copper bead,
This shell, whose story is a world's, could we but read.

How many a kindred hand
Hath, as it passed from land to land,
Touched it, and left a pulse to thrill
The Aryan blood which leaps within us still;
What memories of all that then befell
Are, like an Iliad, shut within this little shell!

Apply it to your ear. And listen!—
No, you cannot hear;
Yet how the arrow-heads of stone
Sang; how the bronze swords rang; how shriek and groan
Followed the stone celt's thud, as wave by wave,
The Aryan exodus for ever westward drave?

For ever westward! New
Wild worlds still opened; but the Blue
That brooded o'er them was the same
Unchanging God that brooded whence they came.
For ever westward! And the shell was cast
Westward; and great fresh waves still swept beyond the last.

Across the infinite plains
White cattle draw the lumbering wains;
Huge lop-eared mastiffs guard and keep
The silky goats and heavy horned sheep;
Dark lines of life crawl where the great lakes shine,
And close against the sunset creeps a fainter line.

The rosy peaks of snow
Arise, and like a pageant go;
Primeval forest, pathless fen,
Dragons, and hordes of brutal-visaged men
Fleet past; and ever where the dark lines turn,
In sudden fields of wheat the scarlet poppies burn.

Hark! in the dead of night,
What cries are these? What crimson light
Leaps o'er the mere, and redly streaks
The snowy pine-wood and the icy peaks?
What splashing paddles these? - the morn will break
On tree-piled hovels smouldering in an Alpine lake.

Still westward! And the sun,
Burning o'er Jutland, has begun
To bleach the many-cycled firs!
A fresher life-sap through the forest stirs,
And tall and green the little oaks have grown
Round the Bronze Man at death-grips with the Man of Stone!

What year was it that blew
The Aryan's wicker-work canoe
Which brought the shell to English land?
What prehistoric man or woman's hand,
With what intent, consigned it to this grave—
This barrow set in sound of the Ancient World's last wave?

Beside it in the mound
A charmed bead of flint was found.
Some woman surely in this place,
Covered with flowers a little baby-face,
And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast;
And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?

Was it a jewel meant
To mark deep love or high descent;
A many-virtued amulet;
A sign to know the child by when they met;
A coin for that last journey through the night—
A coin of little worth, a childless widow's mite?

No man shall ever know!
It happened all so long ago
That this same childless woman may
Have stood upon the cliffs around the bay
And watched for tin-ships that no longer came,
Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman flame.

poem by William Canton (1887)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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