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
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poem by William Canton (1887)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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