Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When o’er the nursing sod,
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.
Langdon Smith: Quotes about death
Langdon Smith was American journalist. Explore interesting quotes on death.
Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.
Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.
These lines just before the final four do not appear in most published versions, but were included in the version published in The Book of Poetry (1927) edited by Edwin Markham. It is not known whether they existed in the second newspaper publication, of which no copies are known to survive, or derived from manuscript variants.
Evolution (1895; 1909)