Half of our , half our pain, Half the dark background of our self-reproach,
Is thought of how the world has sinned before.
We, being one, one with all life, we feel
The misdemeanors of uncounted time;
We suffer in the foolishness and sins
Of races just behind us,—burn with shame
At their gross ignorance and murderous deeds;
We suffer back of them in the long years
Of squalid struggling of beasts,—
Beasts human and subhuman; back of them
In helpless creatures eaten, hunted, torn;
In submerged forests dying in the slime;
And even back of that in endless years
Of hot convulsions of dismembered lands,
And slow centuries of cold.
So in our own lives, even to this day,
We carry in the of the mind
The tale of errors, failures, and misdeeds
That we call sins, of all our early lives.
And the recurrent consciousness of this
We call . The unrelenting ,
Now measuring past error,—this is shame.
And in our overconsciousness,
A retroactive and preactive sense,—
Fired with our self-made theories of sin,—
We suffer, suffer, suffer—half alive,
And half with the dead scars of suffering.
Friends, how would you, perhaps, have made the world?
Would you have balanced the great forces so
Their interaction would have bred no shock?
No cosmic throes of newborn continents,
No eras of the earth-encircling rain,—
Uncounted scalding tears that fell and fell
On molten worlds that hotly dashed them back
In storms of fierce steam?
Would you have made earth’s without the fire,
Without the water, and without the weight
Of crushing cubic miles of rock?
Would you have made one kind of plant to
In all the earth, growing mast high, and then
Keep it undying so, and end of plan............