Barrack Room Ballads: IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE

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IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE

IN the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
     For food and fame and two-toed horses’ pelt;
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
     And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
     Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove,
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
     Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival of Solutré told the tribe my style was outré
     By a hammer, grooved of dolomite, he fell.
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, beneath the heart
     Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,
     And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
     For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came,
     And he told me in a vision of the night:
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
     And every single one of them is right!”

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
     Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;
And I stepped beneath Time’s finger once again a tribal singer
     And a minor poet certified by Tr—l.

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow,
     When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
     And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
     Still we pinch and slap and jabber—scratch and dirk;
Still we let our business slide—as we dropped the half-dressed hide
     To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large,—seven seas from marge to marge,
     And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khat mandhu
     And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
     And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
     And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right.

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