Carlyle Poem by Alexander Anderson

England, amid thy great in this great time
One man, white-haired, with misty, flashing eyes
Looms from the rest, in his life's toil sublime,
And all that hath the power to make us wise.


We hail him teacher, not as now they teach,
With soulless flow of ever-ready words;
He shapes his own life to his uttered speech,
As deft musicians to the air the chords.


So in this age when the quick growth of creeds
Grows up, as if to choke God's primal plan,
Ye who still waver in your higher needs,
Come and look nearer at this grey old man.


The Hebrew spirit, with its fervent fire,
Its vatic utterances of rapt word force
Is in him, bursting in explosive ire,
Like lightning when it takes its blinding course.


And Cant, girt in her armour o'er and o'er,
Lifting her putrid wings as if to fly,
Sinks in the slime of her own tracks, before
The word bolts of this thunderer to die.


He will not rest himself on other ground
Than that which God's own workers have made smooth;
All other is to him the heave and bound,
And the volcanic motion of untruth.


This struggle for firm footing for his feet
Hath made his inner vision far and clear,
Piercing the under current, and the heat
That nourishes the action we have here.


Stern Cromwells, Luthers, Knoxes unto him
Rise from the world's wild clamour, and serene
Stand in heroic light that cannot dim
The virtue and the duty that have been.


All work is noble, but a nobler kind
Is that whose task is ever piercing through
The mummy folds of ignorance to find
True worth in man and hold it up to view.


High privilege this; but he upon whose head
It lights must ever walk and speak in fear,
Knowing the ages listen what is said,
And God above him bending down his ear.


Thus has he ever written, knowing well
What kind of heed to give the countless strings
Of those who, like the Corybantes, yell
When some slow good grows out of human things.


Not looking to the right nor to the left,
But conscious of the guide he had within,
He, armed with his strong battle words, has cleft
Paths for the feebler soul to take and win.


'Thou shalt believe in God,' he cries, 'and own
The sacredness of this poor life, though dim;
It is a part of His, in darkness thrown
Upon the earth to wander back to Him.


'Let no cant be within thy soul, but stand
Upon thy manhood, thy most sure defence,
Working at all true work with willing hand,
And growing up to God-like reverence.'


For reverence with this man is the source
Of all those virtues which, like golden threads,
Draw man still upward with an unseen force
To where his spirit with the higher weds.


Be thou real also, be no sham or quack,
Half seen as manhood sickens and expires,
Two beings in thee resting back to back,
And turning vane-like as the world desires.


It may be that the force in him for this
Has borne him past his distance, as a steed,
The nostrils filling out with snorting hiss,
Tears up the ground before he checks his speed.


For all the early earnestness to wage
Battle with evil, is in him the soul
Of all his thought and life, that now in age
Moves grandly ripening to the wrought-for goal.


Then, brother, take him for thy teacher, let
The spirit of his words flash full on thine,
And thou shalt feel a dignity in sweat,
And all thy life and labour half divine.


I too can feel a pride to think I stand
A worker on a dusty railway here,
Pointing to this man with a feeble hand,
As one by whom the weaker ought to steer.


But he has strengthened me, as teachers ought
Who wrestle onward to the purer change,
Has fused more earnestness into my thought,
And made this manhood take a higher range.


Enough, the shadows lengthen far ahead
When the sun turns his feet to meet the west;
So this man's power shall broaden out and spread
When he, too, takes his well-earned sleep and rest.


But the full day beats on us, and the night
Is yet afar; so with strong heart and limb
Let us go onward, upward, and upright,
Until we take a twilight rest like him.