Edwin Markham Quotes

We are caught in the coil of a God's romances — We come from old worlds and we go afar: I have missed you again in the Earth's wild chances — Now to another star! Perhaps we are led and our loves are fated, And our steps are counted one by one; Perhaps we shall meet and our souls be mated, After the burnt-out sun. For over the world a dim hope hovers, The hope at the heart of all our songs — That the banded stars are in league with lovers, And fight against their wrongs.

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, Cries protest to the Powers that made the world. A protest that is also a prophecy.

I will find you there where our low life heightens, Where the door of the Wonder again unbars, Where the old love lures and the old fire whitens, In the Stars behind the stars.

The crest and crowning of all good,
Life’s final star, is Brotherhood; For it will bring again to Earth Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth; Will send new light on every face, A kingly power upon the race. And till it come, we men are slaves, And travel downward to the dust of graves.

Our ways go wide and I know not whither, But my song will search through the worlds for you, Till the Seven Seas waste and the Seven Stars wither, And the dream of the heart comes true. I am out to the roads and the long, long questing, On dark tides driven, on great winds blown: I pass the runs of the world, unresting, I sail to the unknown.

I fear the vermin that shall undermine Senate and citadel and school and shrine.

It will all come back — the wasted splendor, The heart's lost youth like a breaking flower, The dauntless dare, and the wistful, tender Touch of the April hour.

Come, clear the way, then, clear the way: Blind creeds and kings have had their day. Break the dead branches from the path; Our hope is in the aftermath — Our hope is in heroic men, Star-led to build the world again. To this Event the ages ran: Make way for Brotherhood — make way for Man.

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?

There are more lives yet, there are more worlds waiting, For the way climbs up to the eldest sun, Where the white ones go to their mystic mating, And the Holy Will is done.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

There is a destiny that makes us brothers:
None goes his way alone: All that we send into the lives of others Comes back onto our own. I care not what his temples or his creeds,
One thing holds firm and fast
That into his fateful heap of days and deeds
The soul of man is cast.

As we go star-stilled in the mystic garden, All the prose of this life run there to rhyme, How eagerly then will the poor heart pardon All of these hurts of Time! Ah, yes, in that hour of our souls dream-driven, In that high, white hour, O my wild sea-bride, The tears and the years will be all forgiven, … And all be justified.

If this is a dream, then perhaps our dreaming Can touch life's height to a finer fire: Who knows but the heavens and all their seeming Were made by the heart's desire? One thing shines clear in the heart's sweet reason, One lightning over the chasm runs — That to turn from love is the world's one treason That darkens all the suns.

So I go to the long adventure, lifting My face to the far, mysterious goals, To the last assize, to the final sifting Of gods and stars and souls.