In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt; I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man, And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt. Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove; And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg Were about me and beneath me and above. But a rival, of Solutr]/e, told the tribe my style was _outr]/e_ -- 'Neath a tomahawk of diorite he fell. And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle. Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full, And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong; And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead, For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.” But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came, And he told me in a vision of the night: -- “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right!” . . . . . Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail; And I stepped beneath Time's finger, once again a tribal singer [And a minor poet certified by Tr--ll]. Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow, When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn; When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses, And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne. Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage, Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk; Still we let our business slide -- as we dropped the half-dressed hide -- To show a fellow-savage how to work. Still the world is wondrous large, -- seven seas from marge to marge, -- And it holds a vast of various kinds of man; And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban. Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night: -- There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And -- every -- single -- one -- of -- them -- is -- right! THE STORY OF UNG Once, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago, Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of snow. Fashioned the form of a tribesman -- gaily he whistled and sung, Working the snow with his fingers. _Read ye the Story of Ung!_ Pleased was his tribe with that image -- came in their hundreds to scan -- Handled it, smelt it, and grunted: “Verily, this is a man! Thus do we carry our lances -- thus is a war-belt slung. Lo! it is even as we are. Glory and honour to Ung!”