Page:Armistice Day.djvu/223

Rh (With face and belly flattened to the sod),

Where self may lose itself in Ox or Ape.

But no man cropped the grass among the flowers!

And no man wound a tail about his nape!

Or felt the heat and rain, or saw the sky,

But with a human skin, a human eye!

VI

Yet all these years, whilst our one paltry race

Bustled with flame and sword from place to place

(So troubled lest man's great ideals die),

The old telluric Animals, I guess—

That sniff at hole, or stop with ears aprick,

Or cower forward from the young they lick,

Or with deep meditation prowl and pry,

Knowing their waters in the wilderness,

Knowing their seasons through the land and sky—

Repeated those vast worlds of consciousness

That furnish earth her answer to the moon:

And to the sun and stars her reason—why,—

The Life-Force of her ancient night and noon:

From Arctic tundra to the pampas south,

By glen and glacier, on the seaward ness,

Through belting forests to the river's mouth,

On shaggy mountains in the drench and drouth,

And down the air and ocean streams no less!