The World’s Inheritors
Reading edition
The World’s Inheritors
God gazing down from Heaven saw the World.
Mighty, himself a heav’n, he fill’d the heavens.
His beard fell like a wasted thunder at eve,
And all his robe was woven with white stars,
And on his breast a star.
The World was dark. Deep in a forest there,
Where not the rill that routed in the wood
Dared break the silence, nor one murmur of night
Wound to the stagnant, chill, and listening air,
Five children slumbering lay.
One ruddy as the red grapes of the south;
One duskier, breather of more burning air;
One blue-eyed, blond, and golden-crown’d with locks;
One finely fashion’d in an even mould;
And one hard wrought as steel.
Lord of the Woods their Sire; enormous, rough,
Hair-tangled like the north-bear: but his Mate
Queen of a myriad palaces that shone
With chalcedon and jasper, justly wrought,
And gems of jewel’d stone.
Who when he saw her won her; loved her well;
By her abhor’d: and so he slew her then,
And gazed upon her beauty dead, and died
Himself, lamenting his wild woods. And these
Their wondrous offspring were.
Europe, A.D. 500.
The World beheld them and adored—adored,
And fear’d, and sought to slay them; for
The battle-brood of gods is battle-born.
But they endured; nor in the thunder found
Harm, or the bolt of death.
And God look’d down and spake, and thro’ the Earth
The murmur ran, terranean like the shock
When central earthquakes jar, until the Deep
Foams tingling to the icèd poles; and said,
To these I give the World.
Andamans, 1886-7.