The Garden of Years and Other Poems/“Whom the World Calls Idle”

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

He is brother-born to the wind. Its song, in his heart implanted,
        Stirs and wakes when the morning breaks and the wide horizon burns;
He is brother-born to the sea, and visions of isles enchanted
        Slowly rise to his dreaming eyes from the furrow his labor turns.
Child of fate, be it soon or late that his heart he learns to know,
Not his to say if he roam or stay when the summons bids him go:
        Brother-born to the wind of morn, he must share its endless quest
        Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!

The stretch of the open road, the challenge of heights unmounted,
        The distant cry of the beasts that lie at the mouth of some latent lair,
The sweep of the pathless plain and the speeding of miles uncounted,
        When the rangers ride, with a star for guide, in the face of the battling air—
These are his whose fortune is, like the tireless tide’s, to roam,
Brother-born to the wind of morn, with the whole wide world for home:
        Child of the soil, he must turn from toil to the dim and dreamt-of West,
        Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!

Song of the stately pines to the winds of northward high lands,
        Song of the palms across the calms that sleep on the long lagoon,
Glamour of breathless dawns on the shores of southward islands,
        And the mystical light that tells the night of the birth of the tardy moon:
These—at the gate of his future fate, where the earthly questings end
And the shadows fall—he hath learned to call by the sacred name of friend;
        These, in the strife of his hapless life, he hath learned to love the best
        Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!

Then shall it be for us, who have dreamed no dream Elysian,
        To cry the ban of our fellow-man who brings no grist to mill?
’T is the verve of his viking sires that awakes the plough-boy’s vision,
        And the rover roil in the child of toil is the roil of the rover still!
What is it all, this thrill and thrall, that hath mapped his earthly plan,
Unless some gain we may not explain in the onward march of man?
        Brother-born to the wind of morn, may his lot be not the best
        Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest?

Paris, 1899.