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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116996" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>An Indian Cowrie</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">A GENTLE creature grew<br>Within this cell of pearly blue—<br>How many centuries ago<br>No seer can tell us. We can only know<br>It found life pleasant, moved, and took its ease<br>By palmy island shores in distant Indian seas.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The world has changed since then!<br>Tongues have died out; and tribes of men<br>Have clamoured, and have passed away,<br>Like crow-flights through the sunset of a day;<br>No pillar marks where gorgeous cities fell;<br>But this small speechless life hath left its storied shell.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What matters now to seek<br>How man in that dim dawn antique<br>First owned it; whether fisher spread<br>His snare of palm-tree leaves and baited thread,<br>Or leaf-girt negress, whistling in her speech,<br>Gathered an empty husk upon a tangled beach?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It profits not; and yet,<br>Methinks, some cave-dwarf, carved in jet,<br>With blubber lips and woolly hair,<br>Wagged a huge head, as at some Aryan fair,<br>He bartered for a shred, a copper bead,<br>This shell, whose story is a world's, could we but read.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">How many a kindred hand<br>Hath, as it passed from land to land,<br>Touched it, and left a pulse to thrill<br>The Aryan blood which leaps within us still;<br>What memories of all that then befell<br>Are, like an Iliad, shut within this little shell!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Apply it to your ear. And listen!—<br>No, you cannot hear;<br>Yet how the arrow-heads of stone<br>Sang; how the bronze swords rang; how shriek and groan<br>Followed the stone celt's thud, as wave by wave,<br>The Aryan exodus for ever westward drave?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For ever westward! New<br>Wild worlds still opened; but the Blue<br>That brooded o'er them was the same<br>Unchanging God that brooded whence they came.<br>For ever westward! And the shell was cast<br>Westward; and great fresh waves still swept beyond the last.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Across the infinite plains<br>White cattle draw the lumbering wains;<br>Huge lop-eared mastiffs guard and keep<br>The silky goats and heavy horned sheep;<br>Dark lines of life crawl where the great lakes shine,<br>And close against the sunset creeps a fainter line.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The rosy peaks of snow<br>Arise, and like a pageant go;<br>Primeval forest, pathless fen,<br>Dragons, and hordes of brutal-visaged men<br>Fleet past; and ever where the dark lines turn,<br>In sudden fields of wheat the scarlet poppies burn.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Hark! in the dead of night,<br>What cries are these? What crimson light<br>Leaps o'er the mere, and redly streaks<br>The snowy pine-wood and the icy peaks?<br>What splashing paddles these? - the morn will break<br>On tree-piled hovels smouldering in an Alpine lake.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Still westward! And the sun,<br>Burning o'er Jutland, has begun<br>To bleach the many-cycled firs!<br>A fresher life-sap through the forest stirs,<br>And tall and green the little oaks have grown<br>Round the Bronze Man at death-grips with the Man of Stone!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What year was it that blew<br>The Aryan's wicker-work canoe<br>Which brought the shell to English land?<br>What prehistoric man or woman's hand,<br>With what intent, consigned it to this grave—<br>This barrow set in sound of the Ancient World's last wave?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Beside it in the mound<br>A charmed bead of flint was found.<br>Some woman surely in this place,<br>Covered with flowers a little baby-face,<br>And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast;<br>And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Was it a jewel meant<br>To mark deep love or high descent;<br>A many-virtued amulet;<br>A sign to know the child by when they met;<br>A coin for that last journey through the night—<br>A coin of little worth, a childless widow's mite?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No man shall ever know!<br>It happened all so long ago<br>That this same childless woman may<br>Have stood upon the cliffs around the bay<br>And watched for tin-ships that no longer came,<br>Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman flame.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=William+Canton">William Canton</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116996" data-title="An Indian Cowrie de William Canton" data-description="A GENTLE creature grew/Within this cell of pearly blue—/How many centuries ago/No seer can tell us. We can only know/It found life pleasant, moved, and took its ease/By palmy island shores in distant Indian seas./The world has changed since then..."></div>
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