Page:Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Kipling, 1899.djvu/288

 IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE

the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage

For food and fame and two-toed horses' pelt;

I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,

And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring

Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove,

And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg

Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival of Solutré told the tribe my style was outré—

By a hammer, grooved of dolomite, he fell.

And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, beneath the heart

Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,

And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong; (Copyright, 1893, by Macmillan & Co.)

104