The Ascent of Man in Poem Form

• Apes lifting hairy arms now stand
• And free the wonder?working hand.

• They raise a light aërial house
• On shafts of widely branching trees,
• Where, harboured warily, each spouse
• May feed her little ape in peace,
• Green cradled in his heaven?roofed bed,
• Leaves rustling lullabies o’erhead.

• And lo, ’mid reeking swarms of earth
• Grim struggling in the primal wood,
• A new strange creature hath its birth:
• Wild—stammering—nameless—shameless—nude;
• Spurred on by want, held in by fear,
• He hides his head in caverns drear.

• Most unprotected of earth’s kin,
• His fight for life that seems so vain

• Sharpens his senses, till within
• The twilight mazes of his brain,
• Like embryos within the womb,
• Thought pushes feelers through the gloom.

• And slowly in the fateful race
• It grows unconscious, till at length
• The helpless savage dares to face
• The cave?bear in his grisly strength;
• For stronger than its bulky thews
• He feels a force that grows with use.

• From age to dumb unnumbered age,
• By dim gradations long and slow,
• He reaches on from stage to stage,
• Through fear and famine, weal and woe
• And, compassed round with danger, still
• Prolongs his life by craft and skill.

• With cunning hand he shapes the flint,
• He carves the horn with strange device,

• He splits the rebel block by dint
• Of effort—till one day there flies
• A spark of fire from out the stone:
• Fire which shall make the world his own.

From apes with freed hands to muddled-thinking man in caves, up to clearer-thinking man with fire. A very nice passage about evolution.