o Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
o Affrighted gathering of human kind!
o Eternal lingering of useless pain!
o Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
o And contemplate this ruin of a world.
o Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
o This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
o These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
o A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
o Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
o Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
o In racking torment end their stricken lives.
o To those expiring murmurs of distress,
o To that appalling spectacle of woe,
o Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
o The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
o Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
o “God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
o What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
o That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
o Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
o Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
o In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
o Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,
o Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,
o Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,
o Let them but lash your own security;
o Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.
o When earth its horrid jaws half open shows,
o My plaint is innocent, my cries are just.
o Surrounded by such cruelties of fate,
o By rage of evil and by snares of death,
o Fronting the fierceness of the elements,
o Sharing our ills, indulge me my lament.
o “’T is pride,” ye say—“the pride of rebel heart,
o To think we might fare better than we do.”
o Go, tell it to the Tagus’ stricken banks;
o Search in the ruins of that bloody shock;
o Ask of the dying in that house of grief,
o Whether ’t is pride that calls on heaven for help
o And pity for the sufferings of men.
o “All’s well,” ye say, “and all is necessary.”
o Think ye this universe had been the worse
o Without this hellish gulf in Portugal?
o Are ye so sure the great eternal cause,
o That knows all things, and for itself creates,
o Could not have placed us in this dreary clime
o Without volcanoes seething ’neath our feet?
o Set you this limit to the power supreme?
o Would you forbid it use its clemency?
o Are not the means of the great artisan
o Unlimited for shaping his designs?
o The master I would not offend, yet wish
o This gulf of fire and sulphur had outpoured
o Its baleful flood amid the desert wastes.
o God I respect, yet love the universe.
o Not pride, alas, it is, but love of man,
o To mourn so terrible a stroke as this.
·
o Would it console the sad inhabitants
o Of these aflame and desolated shores
o To say to them: “Lay down your lives in peace;
o For the world’s good your homes are sacrificed;
o Your ruined palaces shall others build,
o For other peoples shall your walls arise;
o The North grows rich on your unhappy loss;
o Your ills are but a link in general law;
o To God you are as those low creeping worms
o That wait for you in your predestined tombs”?
o What speech to hold to victims of such ruth!
o Add not such cruel outrage to their pain.
·
o Nay, press not on my agitated heart
o These iron and irrevocable laws,
o This rigid chain of bodies, minds, and worlds.
o Dreams of the bloodless thinker are such thoughts.
o God holds the chain: is not himself enchained;
o By his indulgent choice is all arranged;
o Implacable he’s not, but free and just.
o Why suffer we, then, under one so just? (1)
o There is the knot your thinkers should undo.
o Think ye to cure our ills denying them?
o All peoples, trembling at the hand of God,
o Have sought the source of evil in the world.
o When the eternal law that all things moves
o Doth hurl the rock by impact of the winds,
o With lightning rends and fires the sturdy oak,
o They have no feeling of the crashing blows;
o But I, I live and feel, my wounded heart
o Appeals for aid to him who fashioned it.
·
o Children of that Almighty Power, we stretch
o Our hands in grief towards our common sire.
o The vessel, truly, is not heard to say:
o “Why should I be so vile, so coarse, so frail?”
o Nor speech nor thought is given unto it.
o The urn that, from the potter’s forming hand,
o Slips and is shattered has no living heart
o That yearns for bliss and shrinks from misery.
o “This misery,” ye say, “is others’ good.”
o Yes; from my mouldering body shall be born
o A thousand worms, when death has closed my pain.
o Fine consolation this in my distress!
o Grim speculators on the woes of men,
o Ye double, not assuage, my misery.
o In you I mark the nerveless boast of pride
o That hides its ill with pretext of content.
·
o I am a puny part of the great whole.
o Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
o All sentient things, born by the same stern law,
o Suffer like me, and like me also die.
·
o The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
o And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
o All ’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
o An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
o The eagle is transfixed by shaft of man;
o The man, prone in the dust of battlefield,
o Mingling his blood with dying fellow-men,
o Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.
o Thus the whole world in every member groans:
o All born for torment and for mutual death.
o And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say
o The ills of each make up the good of all!
o What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice,
o Mortal and pitiful, ye cry, “All ’s well,”
o The universe belies you, and your heart
o Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit.
·
o All dead and living things are locked in strife.
o Confess it freely—evil stalks the land,
o Its secret principle unknown to us.
o Can it be from the author of all good?
o Are we condemned to weep by tyrant law
o Of black Typhon or barbarous Ahriman? (2)
o These odious monsters, whom a trembling world
o Made gods, my spirit utterly rejects.
·
o But how conceive a God supremely good,
o Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
o Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
o What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
o From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
o And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:
o Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
o O wondrous mingling of diversities!
o A God came down to lift our stricken race:
o He visited the earth, and changed it not!
o One sophist says he had not power to change;
o “He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:
o In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,
o The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
o Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
o Across the smiling face of Portugal.
o God either smites the inborn guilt of man,
o Or, arbitrary lord of space and time,
o Devoid alike of pity and of wrath,
o Pursues the cold designs he has conceived.
o Or else this formless stuff, recalcitrant,
o Bears in itself inalienable faults;
o Or else God tries us, and this mortal life
o Is but the passage to eternal spheres.
o ’T is transitory pain we suffer here,
o And death its merciful deliverance.
o Yet, when this dreadful passage has been made,
o Who will contend he has deserved the crown?
o Whatever side we take we needs must groan;
o We nothing know, and everything must fear.
o Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it;
o The human race demands a word of God.
o ’T is his alone to illustrate his work,
o Console the weary, and illume the wise.
o Without him man, to doubt and error doomed,
o Finds not a reed that he may lean upon.
o From Leibnitz learn we not by what unseen
o Bonds, in this best of all imagined worlds,
o Endless disorder, chaos of distress,
o Must mix our little pleasures thus with pain;
o Nor why the guiltless suffer all this woe
o In common with the most abhorrent guilt.
o ’T is mockery to tell me all is well.
o Like learned doctors, nothing do I know.
o Plato has said that men did once have wings
o And bodies proof against all mortal ill;
o That pain and death were strangers to their world.
o How have we fallen from that high estate!
o Man crawls and dies: all is but born to die:
o The world ’s the empire of destructiveness.
o This frail construction of quick nerves and bones
o Cannot sustain the shock of elements;
o This temporary blend of blood and dust
o Was put together only to dissolve;
o This prompt and vivid sentiment of nerve
o Was made for pain, the minister of death:
o Thus in my ear does nature’s message run.
o Plato and Epicurus I reject,
o And turn more hopefully to learned Bayle.
o With even poised scale Bayle bids me doubt.
o He, wise and great enough to need no creed,
o Has slain all systems—combats even himself:
o Like that blind conqueror of Philistines,
o He sinks beneath the ruin he has wrought. (3)
o What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
o Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
o Man is a stranger to his own research;
o He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
o Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
o Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
o But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
o Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
o Our being mingles with the infinite;
o Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
o This world, this theatre of pride and wrong,
o Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness.
o With plaints and groans they follow up the quest,
o To die reluctant, or be born again.
o At fitful moments in our pain-racked life
o The hand of pleasure wipes away our tears;
o But pleasure passes like a fleeting shade,
o And leaves a legacy of pain and loss.
o The past for us is but a fond regret,
o The present grim, unless the future ’s clear.
o If thought must end in darkness of the tomb,
o All will be well one day—so runs our hope.
o All now is well, is but an idle dream.
o The wise deceive me: God alone is right.
o With lowly sighing, subject in my pain,
o I do not fling myself ’gainst Providence.
o Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
o The sunny ways of pleasure’s genial rule;
o The times have changed, and, taught by growing age,
o And sharing of the frailty of mankind,
o Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
o I can but suffer, and will not repine.
·
o A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
o This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
o “To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
o What thou dost lack in thy immensity—
o Evil and ignorance, distress and sin.”
o He might have added one thing further—hope.
Talk about perfect timing. I wrote this post yesterday and then today I got to read a story about Bufflo Bills reciever Steve Johnson who dropped what would have been a game winning touchdown in overtime against the Steelers. 
