WHAT is man? The question floweth
From the lips with ease, and yet
He who best could answer knoweth
Answer true were hard to get:
Not the Sphinx in Egypt olden,
Did a deeper question ask:
Love to strengthen and embolden
Be to answer mine the task.
But a feeble mortal merely;
An immortal now believed:
One too complex to be clearly
Even by himself conceived:
One both complex and immortal
Say I inward going—yea;—
Death is but to Life the portal,
As the poets always say.
From the inner sun a sparklet
He (Man) glows a star in turn,
From whose life evolving circlet
Other living powers are born;
This a meteor, that a starlet,
Burn they while years take wing;
To the cheek the guilt-born scarlet,
Or the glow of bliss to bring.
Yea, let Empires pass; the granite
Boulder moulder into clay;
From their pathway star and planet
And their splendour pass away,
Yet when these have sped, each action,
And each thought we prize or rue,
To our rapture or distraction
Shall the soul immortal view.
Not our merit or dismerit,
But to crown or punish—ne’er;
In the regions of the spirit,
Other ends life’s issues bear.
Deeper than the ocean, even,
Higher than Orion still—
Still to them the power is given,
On to go for good or ill.
Boundless yet for good and evil;
Not for good or evil—loth,
Loth were truth to call him devil,
Man’s a god and devil both.
But the devil weakens, stronger
In his soul the god-head grows,
Till a slave to sin no longer,
On Life’s chequered way he goes.
Up thro’ ill the good still rises,
And the souls thus risen see
What oft hid from dimmer eyes, is
Without ill no good can be.
Nay, thro’ strife with the infernal,
And the sinful only can,
In the courts of the Eternal,
Be a high seat won by Man.
From the shattered limbs of Cælus
Given to the ocean waves,
Venus rose, as legends tell us,
She whose grace the heart enslaves.
So thro’ life with evil shatter’d,
May we seem a moment, when,
Lo! from out the relics scattered
Springs what’s hailed a God to Men.
What is Man? You have my answer,
In a may be less prized song,
Than a tip-toed, tight-rope dance, were
By yon wonder stricken throng.
Yet however weak it seemeth
’Tis from one the truth would know,
And for Truth’s advantage streameth—
Would all lauded songs did so.
Other works by Joseph Skipsey...
