RECENT POETRY AND EMOTIONALIZING OF EVOLUTION II 



Mere mouths, voracities boundless, blind lusts, desires without tongue, 

 And ferocities vast, fulfilling their being's malignant law. 

 While nature was but one hunger, and one hate, all fangs and maw. 

 With that, for a single moment, abashed at his own descent, 

 In humbleness Man's Spirit at the feet of the Maker bent; 

 But, swifter than light, he recovered the stature and pose of his pride. 

 And, "Think not thus to shame me with my mean birth," he cried, 

 "For this is my loftiest greatness, that I was born so low; 

 Greater than Thou the ungrowing am I that for ever grow." 



Eventually Man overthrew Death; but "his Soul rejoiced not, for 

 the breath of his being was strife." So he prayed for succor until 

 God from his loneHer height restored Death and Hope; and with them 

 renewed the deHght of seeking and the rapture of striving, the only 

 transcendent joy. 



This time, then, we find not only the acceptance of the upward 

 struggle, but the recognition that it has been our highest pride for 

 the past and must be our deepest joy in the future. Many may still 

 feel that Love and unsubdued Hope are the final truth of the universe 

 as well as the final cry of the human heart; but even the most con- 

 servative will scarcely deny that Mr. Watson has garnered sheaves 

 of real poetry from this field that once appeared so unpromising. 

 Surely the field must be naturally fertile or the sheaves could not be 

 so rich and fair. Moreover, as the result of Mr. Watson's garnering, 

 not a few of his fellow-men will be helped to reahze emotion- 

 ally the field they have already entered upon with the footsteps of 

 reason. 



Leaving the trend represented by Mr. Watson, we may find in 

 such a singer as Mr. Stephen Phillips the voice of those who prefer to 

 see an "omnipotent Benevolence" behind the veil. He accepts just 

 as freely and fully the general course of evolution ; but he finds therein 

 the planning mind of the demiurge, the guiding hand of the father, 

 who is kindly, even if far removed and dimly discerned. "Midnight — 

 the 31st of December, 1900,"^ is the title of a Janus-faced poem. The 

 writer is primarily thinking forward; but his eye can descry no vision 

 of the future dissevered from the history of the past; his vaticinations 



' New Poems, pp. 28-40, 1907. 



