The Ascent of Man

Mathilde Blind

1889

Chaunts of Life

I

Struck out of dim fluctuant forces and shock of electrical vapour,
Repelled and attracted the atoms flashed mingling in union primeval,
And over the face of the waters far heaving in limitless twilight
Auroral pulsations thrilled faintly, and, striking the blank heaving surface,
The measureless speed of their motion now leaped into light on the waters.
And lo, from the womb of the waters, upheaved in volcanic convulsion,
Ribbed and ravaged and rent there rose bald peaks and the rocky
Heights of confederate mountains compelling the fugitive vapours
To take a form as they passed them and float as clouds through the azure.
Mountains, the broad-bosomed mothers of torrents and rivers perennial,
Feeding the rivers and plains with patient persistence, till slowly,
In the swift passage of aeons recorded in stone by Time’s graver,
There germ grey films of the lichen and mosses and palm-ferns gigantic,
And jungle of tropical forest fantastical branches entwining,
And limitless deserts of sand and wildernesses primeval.

II

Lo, moving o’er chaotic waters,
   Love dawned upon the seething waste,
Transformed in ever new avatars
   It moved without pause or haste:
Like sap that moulds the leaves of May
   It wrought within the ductile clay.
And vaguely in the pregnant deep,
   Clasped by the glowing arms of light
From an eternity of sleep
   Within unfathomed gulfs of night
A pulse stirred in the plastic slime
Responsive to the rhythm of Time.
Enkindled in the mystic dark
   Life built herself myriad forms,
And, flashing its electric spark
   Through films and cells and pulps and worms,
Flew shuttlewise above, beneath,
Weaving the web of life and death.
And multiplying in the ocean,
   Amorphous, rude, colossal things
Lolled on the ooze in lazy motion,
   Armed with grim jaws or uncouth wings;
Helpless to lift their cumbering bulk
They lurch like some dismasted hulk.
And virgin forest, verdant plain,
   The briny sea, the balmy air,
Each blade of grass and globe of rain,
   And glimmering cave and gloomy lair
Began to swarm with beasts and birds,
With floating fish and fleet-foot herds.
The lust of life’s delirious fires
   Burned like a fever in their blood,
Now pricked them on with fierce desires,
   Now drove them famishing for food,
To seize coy females in the fray,
Or hotly hunted for prey.
And amorously urged them on
   In wood or wild to court their mate,
Proudly displaying in the sun
   With antics strange and looks elate,
The vigour of their mighty thews
Or charm of million-coloured hues.
There crouching ’mid the scarlet bloom,
   Voluptuously the leopard lies,
And through the tropic forest gloom
   The flaming of his feline eyes
Stirs with intoxicating stress
The pulses of the leopardess.
Or two swart bulls of self-same age
   Meet furiously with thunderous roar,
And lash together, blind with rage,
   And clanging horns that fain would gore
Their rival, and so win the prize
Of those impassive female eyes.
Or in the nuptial days of spring,
   When April kindles bush and brier,
Like rainbows that have taken wing,
   Or palpitating gems of fire,
Bright butterflies in one brief day
Live but to love and pass away.
And herds of horses scour the plains,
   The thickets scream with bird and beast
The love of life burns in their veins,
   And from the mightiest to the least
Each preys upon the other’s life
In inextinguishable strife.
War rages on the teeming earth;
   The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature’s birth:
   A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.
There is no truce to this drawn battle,
   Which ends but to begin again;
The drip of blood, the hoarse death-rattle,
   The roar of rage, the shriek of pain,
Are rife in fairest grove and dell,
Turning earth’s flowery haunts to hell.
A hell of hunger, hatred, lust,
   Which goads all creatures here below,
Or blindworm wriggling in the dust,
   Or penguin in the Polar snow:
A hell where there is none to save,
Where life is life’s insatiate grave.
And in the long portentous strife,
   Where types are tried even as by fire,
Where life is whetted upon life
   And step by panting step mounts higher,
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.

Credits

Mathilde Blind, The Ascent of Man (London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1889), pp. 7–17.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

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Creator Bio

Mathilde Blind

1841–1896

A British poet, critic, novelist, and essayist who gained prominence in the 1880s for her daring feminist, atheist, and democratic ideals, incisive literary criticism, and sophisticated poetry of ideas, Blind was born in Mannheim as Mathilde Cohen to Jacob Abraham Cohen, a merchant and financier, and to Friederike Cohen (Ettlinger). Blind spent her adolescence in London with her mother and stepfather Karl Blind, a radical republican who had participated in the Revolution of 1848 and continued to associate with pan-European republican circles, including Karl Marx, the pioneering feminist Caroline Ashurst Stanfield, and the great Italian republican activist-intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini. Blind asserted feminist, radical republican, and freethinking ideals from her adolescence, leaving (or being expelled from) a “ladies’ institute” to travel through Switzerland on her own at age seventeen and pursuing her educational path with mentors like the free-thinking Swiss philosopher-philologist Kuno Fischer and, back in London, with Mazzini, whose thought and experiences were central to her first book of poetry, Poems (1867, pseudonymous). In the 1870s, Blind began to publish poetry and critical essays under her own name and quickly established herself in avant-garde British literary circles and journals of the time, like Dark Blue and Atheneum. Claiming the mantle of aesthetic and political radicalism associated with Shelley, her work fused erudition, formal power, sensitive treatments of the natural and inner world, and multiform political and intellectual radicalism. Her “The Ascent of Man” articulated a complex feminist perspective on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and was viewed by many, including Blind, as her crowning work.

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