Edwin Markham Quotes

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?

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.

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.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?

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 all shores? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — With those who shaped him to the thing he is — When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world. After the silence of the centuries?

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

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.

It was ages ago in life's first wonder I found you, Virgilia, wild sea-heart; And 'twas ages ago that we went asunder, Ages and worlds apart. Your luminous face and your hair's dark glory, I knew them of old by an ocean-stream, In a far, first world now turned to story, Now faded back to dream.

He drew a circle that shut me out — Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.