Very much more easy to understand are the stanzas upon "Earth and Man." These attempt to explain the real problem of man's existence. The poet represents the earth as a person, a mother, a nurse. But this mother, this nurse, this divine person is not able to do everything for man. She can give him life; she can feed him; but she cannot help him otherwise, except upon the strange condition that he helps himself. She makes him and embraces him, but that is all. Otherwise he must make his own future, his own happiness or misery. For he is in the lists Contentious with the elements, whose dower First sprang him; for swift vultures to devour If he desists. His breath of instant thirst Is warning of a creature matched with strife, To meet it as a bride, or let fall life On life's accursed. That is, man in this world is like an athlete, or a warrior in the lists--in the place of contests. With what must he contend? First of all, he must contend with the very elements of nature, with the very same forces which brought him into being, or as the poet says "sprang him." And if he hesitates to fight with those forces, then quickly the vultures of death seize upon him. The condition of his existence is struggle. Even the first cry of the child, the cry of thirst for the mother's milk, signifies that man is born to desire and to toil and to contend. He must either meet the duty of struggle as gladly as he would meet a bride, or he must acknowledge himself unfit to live, and cursed by his own mother, Nature. Nature is not to be thought of as a mother that pets her child and weeps over its small sorrows; no, she is a good mother, but very rough, and she loves only the child that fights and conquers. She has no pity upon him except as he fights and wins. She cannot do certain things for him; she cannot develop his mind--he must do that for himself. She makes him do it by pain, by terror, by punishing him fearfully for his mistakes. By the consequence of mistakes only does she teach him. She urges him forward by hunger and by fear, but there is no mercy for him if he blunders. I want you to remember that the poet is not speaking of the separate individual man, but of mankind and of the history of the human race. According to modern science, man was at the beginning nothing more than an animal; he has become what he is through knowledge of suffering, and the poet describes his sufferings in the beginning: By hunger sharply sped To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use, In each new ring he bears a giant's thews, An infant's head. And ever that old task Of reading what he is and whence he came, Whither to go, finds wilder letters flame Across her mask.