FAREWELL oh mocking Wind! No more I mix Thine airy substance with my world, the Tree: Farewell, oh Carbon, that I cannot fix, And Oxygen, that I no more set free! They tell me I have helped the trunk to grow, The roots to suck the earth, the boughs to fork, The fruits to ripen -- well, it may be so, But I am dying, and shall soon be cork. Dead, sapless cork! yet I remember still My moist and merry life in windy March; How green I was! how full of chlorophyll! But soon it shrivelled, leaving only starch. Blest epoch! when transparent and elastic, My membrane scarce restrained its endoplast, When, homogeneous, semi-fluid, plastic, My vital molecules rotated fast. Dry as I am, I once was young and tender, Alive with chemic yearnings; then, alas! What thoughtless joy was mine, in spring tide splendour, To decompose carbonic acid gas! Oh, had I sunk to inorganic slumber, And left the atoms to their gaseous glee! The greatest pleasure of the greatest number My life may serve -- but what is that to me? Backward I look, as o'er a fearful chasm, To days when I rejoiced to live and grow; Now less and less becomes my protoplasm, My nucleus divided long ago. My wall grows thicker, dryer -- oh to issue From this dark prison, where compressed I dwell, To live, no more a part of any tissue, But a primordial protoplasmic cell! A cell amoeboid, drifting from its mother, Naked and houseless in the cruel storm, Having no aid of sister or of brother, Nor any cellulose to keep it warm; Yet having freedom! Nay, the dream I banish, The time of cell-division long is past; Slowly and surely, all my contents vanish, My walls are waterproof -- I'm cork at last! |