A WONDERFUL POEM

Otaki Mail, 19 January 1920, Page 4

A WONDERFUL POEM

(BY FAMOUS AMERICAN

JOURNALIST.)

The author of the subjoined poem (Mr Langdon Smith) was employed on the Sunday edition of the “New York Herald,’' and while so engaged in 1865 wrote the iirst few stanzas, and got them printed in the “Herald.” Four years later, having joined the staE of the “New York Journal” in the interim, Mr Smith found the verses among his papers, and, reading them over, was struck with a sense of their incompleteness. He added a stanza or two, and laid the poem aside. Later he wrote more stanzas, and iinally completed it and sent it in to Mr Arthur Brisbane, editor of the “Evening Journal.” Mr Brisbane, being unable to use it, turned it over to Mr C. E. Russell, of the “Morning Journal.” It appeared in the “Morning Journal” — in the middle of a page of want advertisements. Even so, Mr Smith received letters of congratulation from all parts of the world, along with requests for copies. The poem has been in constant demand ever since:—

When you were a tadpole and I was .a fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide AVe sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Gambian fen. My heart was rife with the joy of life, For,l loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved, And mindless at last we died; And deep in a rife of the Carudoc drift "We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of

time, The hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the

womb of death And crept into light again.

We were Amphibians, sealed and tailed, And drab as a dead man’s hand; We coiled at ease ’neath the dripping trees, Or trailed through the mud and sand.

Croaking and Wind, with our threeclawed feet, AVriting a language dumb, AVitli never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived, and happy ~wc loved, And happy we died once more; Our forms were rolled in the clinging mould Of a Ncoeomiuu shore. The eous came and the cons fled, And the sleep that wrapt us fast AVas riven away in a newer day, And the night of death was past.

AVhen light and swift through the jungle trees AVe swung in our airy flights, Or breathed in the balms of the trended palms In the hush of the moonless nights. And oh!< what beautiful years were these.

AVhen our hearts clung each to each; AVhen life was tilled and our senses thrilled Iu the iirst faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life, and love by love, AVe passed through the .cycles strange, And breath by breath, and death by death, AVe followed the chain of change, Till there came a time in the law of life

AVhen over the nursing sod The shadows broke, and the soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was the wed like an Aurora bull, And tusked like the great Cave Bear;

And you. my sweet, from head to feet. AVerc gowned in your glorious hair. Deep in the gloom of a tireless cave, AAhen the night fell o'er the plain. And the moon hung red o’er the rfver bed.

AVe mumbled the bones of the slain

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge. And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland dank, And titled it. head and haft. Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn. Where the Mammoth came to drink; Through brawn and bone I drove the stone, And slew him upon the brink,

Load I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson

feast The clan came trooping in. O’er joint and gristle and padded hoof

We fought, and clawed, and tore. And cheek by jowl, with many a growl. We talked the marvel o’er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone With rude and hairy hand. I pictured his fall on the cavern wall. That men might understand. For we lived by blood and the right of might Ere human laws were drawn. And the Age of Sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago, i In a time that no man knows; Yet here to-night, in the mellow light. We sit at Delmonico’s. Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is as dark as jet: Your years are few, your life is net. Your soul untried, and vet Oar trail is on the Kimeridge clay, And the scrap of the Purbeck flags, We our bones in Hie iiagshs)-

And deep in the Coraline crags. Our love is old, our lives are old. And death shall come amain; Should it come to day, -what man may say .Wo shall not live again? God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds, And furnished them wings .to fly; * He sowed our spawn in the world’s dim dawh. And I know that it shall not die, Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook-boned men made war, And the ox-wain creaks o’er tlie buried caves Where the mummied mammoths are. Then as we linger at luncheon here O'er many -a dainty dish. Let us drink once anew to the time when you Were a Tadpole and I was a fish.