Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE MAN FORBID, by JOHN DAVIDSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE MAN FORBID, by             Poem Explanation     Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Mankind has cast me out. When I became
Last Line: The cliffed escarpment ends in stormclad strength.
Subject(s): Alienation (social Psychology); Animals; Apes; Books; Death; Education; Exiles; Humanity; Life; Mankind; Estrangement; Outcasts; Gorillas; Chimpanzees; Gibbons; Orangutans; Reading; Dead, The; Human Race


MANKIND has cast me out. When I became
So close a comrade of the day and night,
Of earth and of the seasons of the year,
And so submissive in my love of life
And study of the world that I unknew
The past and names renowned, religion, art,
Inventions, thoughts, and deeds, as men unknow
What good and evil fate befell their souls
Before their bodies gave them residence,
(How the old letter haunts the spirit still!
As if the soul were other than the sum
The body's powers make up—a golden coin,
Amount of so much silver, so much bronze!)
I said, rejoicing, 'Now I stand erect,
'And am that which I am.' Compassionate
I watched a motley crowd beside me bent
Beneath unsteady burdens, toppling loads
Of volumes, news and lore antique, that showered
About their ears to be re-edified
On aching heads and shoulders overtasked.
Yet were these hodmen cheerful, ignorant
Of woe whose character it is to seem
Predestined and an honourable care:
They read their books, re-read, and read again;
They balanced libraries upon their polls,
And tottered through the valley almost prone,
But certain they were nobler than the beasts.
I saw besides in fields and cities hordes
Of haggard people soaked in filth and slime
Wherewith they fed the jaded earth the while
Their souls of ordure stank; automata
That served machines whose tyrannous revolt
Enthralled their lords, as if the mistletoe
Displaying mournful gold and wintry pearls
On sufferance, should enchant the forest oak
To be its accident and parasite;
Wretches and monsters that were capable
Of joy and sorrow once, their bodies numbed,
Their souls deflowered, their reason disendowed
By noisome trades, or at the furnaces,
In drains and quarries and the sunless mines;
And myriads upon myriads, human still
Without redemption drudging till they died.

Aware how multitudes of those enslaved
No respite sought, but squandered leisure hours
Among the crowd whose choice or task it was
To balance libraries upon their polls,
I laughed a long low laugh with weeping strung,
A rosary of tears, to see mankind
So dauntless and so dull, and cried at last,
'Good people, honest people, cast them off
'And stand erect, for few are helped by books.
'What! will you die crushed under libraries?
'Lo! thirty centuries of literature
'Have curved your spines and overborne your brains!
'Off with it—all of it! Stand up; behold
'The earth; life, death, and day and night!
'Think not the things that have been said of these;
'But watch them and be excellent, for men
'Are what they contemplate.'

They mocked me: 'Yah!
'The fox who lost his tail! Though you are crazed
'We have our wits about us.'

'Nay,' I cried;
'There was besides an ape who lost his tail
'That he might change to man. Undo the past!
'The rainbow reaches Asgard now no more;
'Olympus stands untenanted; the dead
'Have their serene abode in earth itself,
'Our womb, our nurture, and our sepulchre.
'Expel the sweet imaginings, profound
'Humanities and golden legends, forms
'Heroic, beauties, tripping shades, embalmed
'Through hallowed ages in the fragrant hearts
'And generous blood of men; the climbing thoughts
'Whose roots ethereal grope among the stars,
'Whose passion-flowers perfume eternity,
'Weed out and tear, scatter and tread them down;
'Dismantle and dilapidate high heaven.
'It has been said: Ye must be born again.
'I say to you: Men must be that they are.
'Philosophy, the juggling dupe who finds
'Astounding meanings in the Universe,
'Commodiously secreted by himself;
'Religion, that appoints the soul a flight
'Empyreal—hoods its vision then and plucks
'Its plumes, its arching pinions tethers down
'To flap about a laystall; Art sublime,
'The ancient harlot of the ages, she
'Whose wig of golden tinct, enamelled face
'And cushioned bosom rivet glowing looks,
'Whose scented flatulence diviner seems
'Than dulcet breath of girls who keep their trysts
'In hawthorn brakes devoutly, when the sap
'Bestirs the troubled forest and the winds
'Solace the moonlit earth with whispered news:
'Religion, Art, Philosophy—this God,
'This Beauty, this Idea men have filled
'The world with, study still, and still adore,
'Are only segments of the spirit's tail
'We must outgrow, if spirit would ascend,
'(Let Spirit be the word for body-and-soul!
'Will language ne'er be fused and forged anew?)
'And quit the withering life of fear and shame,
'Of agony and pitiful desire
'To reign untailed in heaven hereafter—Laugh!
'The changing image seizes you. Or thus:
'This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,
'This hallowed bower and harvest of delight
'Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,
'Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,
'Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones
'Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood
'Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed
'With brains of madmen and the broken hearts
'Of children. Understand it, you at least
'Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night
'With roots of luxury, a cancer struck
'In every muscle: out of you it is
'Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;
'You are the hidden putrefying source
'Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,
'Of passionate loves and high imaginings;
'You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet.
'I say, uproot it; plough the land; and let
'A summer-fallow sweeten all the World.'

With mud bespattered, bruised with staves and stoned—
'You called us dung!'—me from their midst they drove.
Alone I went in darkness and in light,
Colour and sound attending on my steps,
And life and death, the ministers of men,
My constant company. But in my heart
Of hearts I longed for human neighbourhood,
And bent my pride to win men back again.
I came, a penitent; and on my knees
I climbed their stairs; I thundered at their doors,
And cried, 'I am your brother; in your wrath,
'As brethren should, destroy me; at your hands
'I must have life or death: I cannot bear
'The outcast's fate.'

They bade me then proclaim
How seemed the World now in my penitence.
But when I rose to speak, their palaces,
Their brothels, slums, cathedrals, theatres,
Asylums, factories, exchanges, banks,
The patched-up world of heirlooms, hand-me-downs
That worm and moth dispute, of make-believe,
Of shoddy, pinchbeck, sweepings of the street,
Of war disguised, of unconcealed chicane,
Of shrivelled drudge and swollen parvenu,
Turned at my glance into that murky vale
Where patient hodmen on their rounded backs
Sustained the thought of thirty centuries,
Where multitudes of slaves renounced their rest
To balance libraries upon their polls;
Or to that giant oaf (for vision shifts
The world about like winds that shape the clouds)
Whose spiritual tail, most awkward now
That breeches hide the rump, is cherished still
With ursine piety; or to that bower
Of Heaven's Delight whose barbed and cancerous roots
Are struck in earthly soil enriched with blood
Of men and women. As I saw I said:
(How could I else!) and bade them as before
'Arise! Uproot the pleasance; plough the land,
'And let the World lie fallow. Only then
'Can any seed of change have room to grow.'

They yelled upon me and their missiles flew;
But one arose to represent the World,
And at his nod their clamour ceased. He said:
'There is no harbour here for such as you.
'You know not what you say nor understand
'How you have hurt yourself. You cannot—fool,
'And answered as befits!—contrive to make
'A monkey human by caudatomy;
'Nor can humanity transcend itself
'By shearing off its spirit at the root.
'That of the tail is false analogy.
'Man springs from out the past: his tap-roots pierce
'The strata of the ages, drawing strength
'From every generation, every cult.
'The scission of the smallest rootlet harms
'His growth.'

Then turning he adjured the crowd:
'Be warned or be accursed! This monster steps
'Beyond the scope and furthest bound of man:
'Mere mirror is his brain; his heart, mere husk.
'A waft of death comes from him. Would you live
'Indifferent to your own delight, unmoved
'By kindred sorrow, and oblivious
'Of all your fathers did, then give him ear,
'And quit forever the resourceful past.
'I know you will not. What! Some pause to think?
'Resort now to the knife and you will find
' 'Tis not an unbecoming, useless tail
'You sever manfully to be yourselves,
'But suicide of soul that you commit.'

To me: 'You ask for life or death from us,
'Because you cannot bear the outcast's fate.
'We disregard your claim: what you can bear
'Is no concern of ours: we cast you out.
'Your well-earned portion of the Universe
'Is isolation and eternal death.
'Cut off, an alien, here you have no home:
'No face shall ever gladden at your step,
'No woman long to see you. Get you hence,
'And seek the desert; or since your soul is dead,
'Return your body to the earth at once,
'And let resolved oblivion triumph now.'

Gladly the World approved with hand and voice;
And one, a woman, offered me a knife:
'And let resolved oblivion triumph now,'
She echoed. Had it been my will to die,
I should not then have made the sacrifice
At the World's bidding; but I chose to live,
For while I live the victory is mine.

So I went forth for evermore forbid
The company of men. The Universe,
Systems and suns and all that breathes and is,
Appeared at first in that dread solitude
Only the momentary, insolent
Irruption of a glittering fantasy
Into the silent, empty Infinite.
But eyes and ears were given to me again:
With these a man may do; with these, endure.

I haunt the hills that overlook the sea.
Here in the Winter like a meshwork shroud
The sifted snow reveals the perished land,
And powders wisps of knotgrass dank and dead
That trail like faded locks on mouldering skulls
Unearthed from shallow burial. With the Spring
The west-wind thunders through the budding hedge
That stems the furrowed steep—a sound of drums,
Of gongs and muted cymbals; yellow breasts
And brown wings whirl in gusts, fly chaffering, drop,
And surge in gusts again; in wooded coombs
The hyacinth with purple diapers
The russet beechmast, and the cowslips hoard
Their virgin gold in lucent chalices;
The sombre furze, all suddenly attired
In rich brocade, the enterprise in chief
And pageant of the season, overrides
The rolling land and girds the bosomed plain
That strips her green robe to a saffron shore
And steps into the surf where threads and scales
And arabesques of blue and emerald wave
Begin to damascene the iron sea;
While faint from upland fold and covert peal
The sheep-bell and the cuckoo's mellow chime.
Then when the sovereign light from which we came,
Of earth enamoured, bends most questioning looks,
I watch the land grow beautiful, a bride
Transfigured with desire of her great lord.
Betrothal-music of the tireless larks,
Heaven-high, heaven-wide possesses all the air,
And wreathes the shining lattice of the light
With chaplets, purple clusters, vintages
Of sound from the first fragrant breath and first
Tear-sprinkled blush of Summer to the deep
Transmuted fire, the smouldering golden moons,
The wine-stained dusk of Autumn harvest-ripe;
And I behold the period of Time,
When Memory shall devolve and Knowledge lapse
Wanting a subject, and the willing earth
Leap to the bosom of the sun to be
Pure flame once more in a new time begun:
Here, as I pace the pallid doleful hills
And serpentine declivities that creep
Unhonoured to the ocean's shifting verge,
Or where with prouder curve and greener sward,
Surmounting peacefully the restless tides,
The cliffed escarpment ends in stormclad strength.




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