[ExI] Jack London on primeval feelings

Robert Masters rob4332000 at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 24 04:47:06 UTC 2009




>From Jack London's THE CALL OF THE WILD
(arranged as verse):


With the aurora borealis
flaming coldly overhead,
or the stars leaping in the frost dance,
and the land numb and frozen
under its pall of snow,
this song of the huskies
might have been the defiance of life,
only it was pitched in minor key,
with long-drawn wailings
and half-sobs,
and was more the pleading of life,
the articulate travail of existence.

It was an old song,
old as the breed itself--
one of the first songs of a younger world
in a day when songs were sad.

It was invested
with the woe of unnumbered generations
this plaint
by which Buck
was so strangely stirred.

When he moaned and sobbed,
it was with the pain of living
that was of old
the pain of his wild fathers,
and the fear and mystery
of the cold and dark
that was to them fear and mystery.

And that he should be stirred by it
marked the completeness
with which he harked back
through the ages of fire and roof
to the raw beginnings of life
in the howling ages.







      



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