EVOLUTIONBy Langdon SmithWhen you were a tadpole and I was a fishIn the Paleozoic time,And side by side on the ebbing tideWe sprawled through the ooze and slime,Or skittered with many a caudal flipThrough the depths of the Cambrian fen,My heart was rife with the joy of life,For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we lovedAnd mindless at last we died;And deep in the rift of the Caradoc driftWe 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 deathAnd crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,And drab as a dead man’s hand;We coiled at ease ’neath the dripping treesOr trailed through the mud and sand.

Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feetWriting a language dumb,With never a spark in the empty darkTo hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,And happy we died once more;Our forms were rolled in the clinging moldOf a Neocomian shore.

The eons came and the eons fledAnd the sleep that wrapped us fastWas riven away in the newer dayAnd the night of death was past.

Then light and swift through the jungle treesWe swung in our airy flights,Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palmsIn the hush of the moonless nights;And oh!

what beautiful years were thereWhen our hearts clung each to each;When life was filled and our senses thrilledIn the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by loveWe passed through the cycles strange,And breath by breath and death by deathWe followed the chain of change.

Till there came a time in the law of lifeWhen over the nursing sideThe shadows broke and the soul awokeIn a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auroch bullAnd tusked like the great cave bear;And you, my sweet, from head to feetWere gowned in your glorious hair.

Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,When the night fell o’er the plainAnd the moon hung red o’er the river bedWe mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edgeAnd shaped it with brutish craft;I broke a shank from the woodland lankAnd fitted it, head and haft;Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,Where the mammoth came to drink;Through the brawn and bone I drove the stoneAnd slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,Loud answered our kith and kin;From west to east to the crimson feastThe clan came tramping in.

O’er joint and gristle and padded hoofWe fought and clawed and tore,And cheek by jowl with many a growlWe talked the marvel o’er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer boneWith rude and hairy hand;I pictured his fall on the cavern wallThat men might understand.

For we lived by blood and the right of mightEre human laws were drawn,And the age of sin did not beginTill our brutal tush was gone.

And that was a million years agoIn a time that no man knows;Yet here tonight in the mellow lightWe sit at Delmonico’s.

Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,Your hair is dark as jet,Your years are few, your life is new,Your soul untried, and yet —Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clayAnd the scarp of the Purbeck flags;We have left our bones in the Bagshot stonesAnd deep in the Coralline crags;Our love is old, our lives are old,And death shall come amain;Should it come today, what man may sayWe shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc bedsAnd furnished them wings to fly;He sowed our spawn in the world’s dim dawn,And I know that I shall not die,Though cities have sprung above the gravesWhere the crook-bone men make warAnd the oxwain creaks o’er the buried cavesWhere the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon hereO’er many a dainty dish,Let us drink anew to the time when youWere a tadpole and I was a fish.

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