What sense, where limbs stumped on without their toes,
As Caterpillar's feet on stem or rose?
Where hands were claws and hooks (not made but born),
And lips were lengthened into beaks of horn?...
When lightning cried the slain from land to land,
What mused the Turtle rounding out the sand?
When boys and girls on Volga starved and Rhine,
What smelt Rhinoceros and Porcupine?
When the Four Sages under Mirrors sat,
What pow-wows were the Jackals, Buzzards, at?....
Huge as the monster Tank that lately rose
Like Dinosaur from mud of fen and flat,
The Elephant erects his trunk and blows:
Is it his joy in Man which causes that,
Or a straw tickling half-way up his nose?
What secrets in the purring of a Cat?
The cooing of the Dove, the shriek of Jay?
Or scream of Sea-Lion, tumbling flapper-finned?—
The air is full of sounds, besides the wind....
VII
Have ye not heard how, as in womb ye grew
(So long before ye waxed to men and slew),
Ye bore from week to week trace merged in trace,
There in the silence, of your pristine race?—
