Edwin Markham: Verses about Silence

I sit among the hoary trees
With Aristotle on my knees
And turn with serious hand the pages,
Lost in the cobweb-hush of ages;
When suddenly with no more sound
Than any sunbeam on the ground,
The little hermit of the place
Is peering up into my face—
The slim gray hermit of the rocks,
With bright, inquisitive, quick eyes,
His life a round of harks and shocks,
A little ripple of surprise.

Now lifted up, intense and still,
Sprung from the silence of the hill
He hangs upon the ledge a-glisten.
And his whole body seems to listen!
My pages give a little start,
And he is gone! to be a part
Of the old cedar's crumpled bark.
A mottled scar, a weather mark!

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this --
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed --
More filled with signs and portents for the soul --
More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings --
With those who shaped him to the thing he is --
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?

Alone I list
In the leafy tryst;
Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep—
Silent the phantom wood in waters deep:
No footfall of a wind along the pass
Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass.
Yonder the wandering weeds,
Enchanted in the light,
Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white;
Yonder are plumy reeds,
Dusking the border of the clear lagoon;
Far off the silver clifts
Hang in ethereal light below the moon;
Far off the ocean lifts,
Tossing its billows in the misty beam,
And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream:
I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken:
This is the valley: here the branches darken
The silver-lighted stream.

Hark—
That rapture in the leafy dark!
Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing,
Waking the upland and the valley under?
What carols, like the blazon of a king,
Fill all the dawn with wonder?
Oh, hush,
It is the thrush,
In the deep and woody glen!
Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung,
When the old Earth was young;
That rapture rang,
When the first morning on the mountains sprang:
And now he shouts, and the world is young again!
Carol, my king,
On your bough aswing!
Thou art not of these evil days—
Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth:
Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth—
How to find God upon these hungry ways;
Tell of the golden prime,
When bird and beast could make a man their friend ;
When men beheld swift deities descend,
Before the race was left alone with Time,
Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end;
Before great Pan was dead,
Before the naiads fled;
When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold,
With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold,
Startled the still dawn—
Shone in upon the mountains and were gone,
Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old.
Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways,
Before the weird earth-hunger of these days,
When there was rippling mirth,
When justice was on Earth,
And light and grandeur of the Golden Age;
When never a heart was sad,
When all from king to herdsman had
A penny for a wage.
Ah, that old time has faded to a dream—
The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream;
Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let
The exiled race not utterly forget;
Publish thy revelation on the lawns—
Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns;
Sometime, in some sweet year,
These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear.


But hark again,
From the secret glen,
That voice of rapture and ethereal youth
Now laden with despair.
Forbear, O bird, forbear:
Is life not terrible enough forsooth?
Cease, cease the mystic song—
No more, no more, the passion and the pain:
It wakes my life to fret against the chain;
It makes me think of all the agéd wrong—
Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all—
Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall.
Ah, ah, that voice again!
It makes me think of all these restless men
Called into time—their progress and their goal;
And now, oh now, it sends into my soul
Dreams of a love that might have been for me—
That might have been—and now can never be.


Tell me no more of these—
Tell me of trancéd trees;
(The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare)
Show me the leafy home of the wild bees;
Show me the snowy summits dim in air;
Tell me of things afar
In valleys silent under moon and star:
Dim hollows hushed with night,
The lofty cedars misty in the light,
Wild clusters of the vine,
Wild odors of the pine,
The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon—
High places where on quiet afternoon
A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream
Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream.


Ha, now
He springs from the bough,
It flickers—he is lost!
Out of the copse he sprang;
This is the floating briar where he tossed:
The leaves are yet atremble where he sang
Here a long vista opens—look!
This is the way he took,
Through the pale poplars by the pond:
Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond.
Ho, there he goes
Through the alder close!
He leaves me here behind him in his flight,
And yet my heart goes with him out of sight!
What whispered spell
Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell?
I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream—
Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on
the fading stream.


Lead on—you know the way
Lead on to Arcady,
O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim;
Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim;
By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome,
Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam.
I follow where you lead,
Down winding paths, across the flowery mead,
Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows,
Up water-courses scented by the rose.
I follow the wandering voice—
I follow, I rejoice,
I fade away into the Age of Gold—
We two together lost in forest old.-
0 ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn,
Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod!
O souls that are weary and are heavy laden,
Here is the peace of God !


Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way:
Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray;
From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run,
With sudden apprehension of the sun;
A light wind stirs
The filmy tops of delicate dim firs,
And on the river border blows,
Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose.
Sing out, O throstle, sing:
I follow on, my king:
Lead me forever through the crimson dawn—
Till the world ends, lead me on!
Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now,
Upspringing from the bough,
Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground,
Without a sound
He drops into a valley and is gone!