Epitaph for the Race of Man

                    I
Before this cooling planet shall be cold,
Long, long before the music of the Lyre,
Like the faint roar of distant breakers rolled
On reefs unseen, when wind and flood conspire
To drive the ships inshore—long, long, I say,
Before this ominous humming hits the ear,
Earth will have come upon a stiller day,
Man and his engines be no longer here.
High on his naked rock the mountain sheep
Will stand alone against the final sky,
Drinking a wind of danger new and deep,
Staring on Vega with a piercing eye,
And gather up his slender hooves and leap
From crag to crag down Chaos, and so go by.

                    II
When Death was young and bleaching bones were few,
A moving hill against the risen day,
The dinosaur at morning made his way,
And dropped his dung along the blazing dew;
Trees with no name that now are agate grew
Lushly beside him in the steamy clay;
He woke and hungered, rose and stalked his prey,
And slept contented, in a world he knew.
In punctual season, with the race in mind, 
His consort held aside her heavy tail,
And took the seed; and heard the seed confined
Roar in her womb; and made a nest to hold
A hatched-out conqueror...but to no avail:
The veined and fertile eggs are long since cold.

                    III
Cretaceous bird, your giant claw no lime
From bark of holly bruised or mistletoe
Could have arrested, could have held you so
Through fifty million years of jostling time;
Yet cradled with you in the catholic slime
Of the young ocean's tepid lapse and flow
Slumbered an agent, weak in embryo,
Should grip you straitly, in its sinewy prime.
What bright collision in the zodiac brews,
What mischief dimples at the planet's core
For shark, for python, for the dove that coos
Under the leaves?—what frosty fate's in store
For warm blood of man,—man, out of the ooze
But lately crawled, and climbing up the shore?

                    IV
O Earth, unhappy planet born to die,
Might I your scribe and your confessor be,
What wonders must you not relate to me
Of Man, who when his destiny was high
Strode like the sun into the middle sky
And shone an hour, and who so bright a he,
And like the sun went down into the sea,
Leaving no spark to be remembered by.
But no; you have not learned in all these years
To tell the leopard and the newt apart;
Man, with his singular laughter, his droll tears,
His engines and his conscience and his art,
Made but a simple sound upon your ears:
The patient beating of the animal heart.

                    V
When Man is gone and only gods remain
To stride the world, their mighty bodies hung
With golden shields, and golden curls outflung
Above their childish foreheads; when the plain
Round skull of Man is lifted and again
Abandoned by the ebbing wave, among
The sand and pebbles of the beach,—what tongue
Will tell the marvel of the human brain?
Heavy with music once this windy shell,
Heavy with knowledge of the clustered stars;
The one-time tenant of this draughty hall
Himself, in learned pamphlet, did foretell,
After some aeons of study jarred by wars,
This toothy gourd, this head emptied of all. 

                    VI
See where Capella with her golden kids
Grazes the slope between the east and north?
Thus when the builders of the pyramids
Flung down their tools at nightfall and poured forth
Homoeward to supper and a poor man's bed,
Shortening the road with friendly jest and slur,
The risen She-Goat showing blue and red
Climbed the clear dusk, and three stars followed her.
Safe in their linen and their spices lie
The kings of Egypt; even as long ago
Under these constellations, with long eye
And scented limbs they slept, and feared no foe.
Their will was law; their will was not to die:
And so they had their way; or nearly so.

Despite their power and their belief that they could preserve their bodies to live forever, the pharaohs could not escape death; and even their great civilization is now merely crumbling ancient ruins.

                    VII
He heard the coughing tiger in the night
Push at his door; close by his quiet head
About the wattled cabin the soft tread
Of heavy feet he followed, and the slight
Sigh of the long banana leaves; in sight
At last and leaning westward overhead
The Centaur and the Cross now heralded
The sun, far off but marching, bringing light.
What time the Centaur and the Cross were spent
Night and the beast retired into the hill,
Whereat serene and undevoured he lay,
And dozed and stretched and listened and lay still,
Breathing into his body with content
The temperate dawn before the tropic day.

                    VIII
Observe how Miyanoshita cracked in two
And slid into the valley; he that stood
Grinning with terror in the bamboo wood
Saw the earth heave and thrust its bowels through
The hill, and his own kitchen slide from view,
Spilling the warm bowl of his humble food
Into the lap of horror; mark how lewd
This cluttered gulf,—'twas here his paddy grew.
Dread and dismay have not encompassed him;
The calm sun sets; unhurried and aloof
Into the riven village falls the rain;
Days pass; the ashes cool; he builds again
His paper house upon oblivion's brim,
And plants the purple iris in its roof.

This stanza refers to the Great Kanto Earthquake on September 1st, 1923, which devastated Tokyo, Yokohama, and surrounding prefectures, also setting off firestorms that caused about 142,000 casualties. At the time, news services reported it as "the greatest disaster in the history of Japan." Miyanoshita was a small onsen (hot springs) resort town in the Hakone Mountains, a popular tourist destination.

A survivor who builds a new home on the edge of ruin represents the tenacious will to live, or the survival instinct.

                    IX
He woke in terror to a sky more bright
Than middle day; he heard the sick earth groan,
And ran to see the lazy-smoking cone
Of the fire-mountain, friendly to his sight
As his wife's hand, gone strange and full of fright;
Over his fleeing shoulder it was shown
Rolling its pitchy lake of scalding stone
Upon his house that had no feet for flight.
Where did he weep?  Where did he sit him down
And sorrow, with his head between his knees?
Where said the Race of Man, "Here let me drown"?
"Here let me die of hunger"?—"let me freeze"?
By nightfall he has built another town:
This boiling pot, this clearing in the trees.

Mt. Tokachidake erupted in 1926, killing 144.

Again, the speaker uses an example of a natural disaster to illustrate human resilience.  In terms of this poem’s relevance to Z for Zachariah, it is important that the speaker is not just concerned with individual struggles for survival but views individual efforts as significant because they enable the entire race to survive.  The man and wife who escape a volcanic eruption are described as building a new "town" that consists of just a cooking pot in a forest clearing, suggesting that even two survivors (like Ann and Loomis) represent society and the human race.

                    X
The broken dike, the levee washed away,
The good fields flooded and the cattle drowned,
Estranged and treacherous all the faithful ground,
And nothing left but floating disarray
Of tree and home uprooted,—was this the day
Man dropped upon his shadow without a sound
And died, having laboured well and having found
His burden heavier than a quilt of clay?
No, no.  I saw him when the sun had set
In water, leaning on his single oar
Above his garden faintly glimmering yet . . .
There bulked the plough, here washed the updrifted weeds . . . .
And scull across his roof and make for shore,
With twisted face and pocket full of seeds.

Here the speaker refers to the "burden" that humans might be tempted to lay down by accepting the death of their species. This is a poem about humanity’s survival (not just individual survival), and the use of “Man” indicates that the referenced “burden” is carried by all humanity. Clearly, the word “burden” means a powerful natural drive to procreate and continue the species. This fundamental motive force underlies the human survival instinct.

The name “Burden” is fitting for the protagonist in Z for Zachariah because the survival of the human race depends on her. More precisely, humanity’s survival depends on Ann Burden's will to procreate.

                    XI
Sweeter was loss than silver coins to spend,
Sweeter was famine than the belly filled;
Better than blood in the vein was the blood spilled;
Better than corn and healthy flocks to tend
And a tight roof and acres without end
Was the barn burned and the mild creatures killed,
And the back aging fast, and all to build:
For then it was, his neighbor was his friend.
Then for a moment the averted eye
Was turned upon him with benignant beam,
Defiance faltered, and derision slept;
He saw in a not unhappy dream
Teh kindly heads against the horrid sky,
And scowled, and cleared his throat and sat, and wept.

Now the speaker asserts that adversity from natural disasters was, paradoxically, better than good fortune because it provoked unusual sympathy from other people, who are normally indifferent or competitive due to their egocentricity. This paradox seems illustrated in Z for Zachariah by the change in Ann’s feelings from fear of Loomis to sympathy for him when he becomes sick and she comes out of hiding to care for him.

Also, in sonnet XI we begin to see how the desire to procreate that underlies the survival instinct is threatened by the desire for solely individual success, which also seems instinctive. This selfishness is the innate “bad cell” that the speaker later refers to in Sonnet XVI.

                    XII 
Now forth to meadows as the farmer goes
With shining buckets to the milking-ground,
He meets the black ant hurrying from his mound
To milk the aphis pastured on the rose;
But no good-morrow, as you might suppose,
No nod of greeting, no perfunctory sound
Passes between them; no occasion's found
For gossip as to how the fodder grows.
In chilly autumn on the hardening road
They meet again, driving their flocks to stall,
Two herdsmen, each with winter for a goad;
They meet and pass, and never a word at all
Gives one to t'other.  On the quaint abode
Of each, the evening and the faint snow fall.

Sonnet XII deals mainly with the alienation of different living creatures from one another. A human farmer and an ant go about their respective labors concerned only for their own survival, paying no attention to one another and indifferent to their similarity. As with the description in Sonnet II of dinosaurs mating “with the race in mind,” the speaker suggests the kinship and similarity between humans and other animals (even ants), all driven by the same basic instincts.

In Z for Zachariah, this similarity between humans and animals is similarly suggested by descriptions of other creatures (particularly crows) going about the business of procreating and continuing their species.

                    XIII
His heatless room the watcher of the stars
Nightly inhabits when the night is clear;
Propping his mattress on the turning sphere,
Saturn his rings or Jupiter his bars
He follows, or the fleeing moons of Mars,
Till from his ticking lens they disappear . . .
Whereat he sighs, and yawns, and on his ear
The busy chirp of Earth remotely jars.
Peace at the void's heart through the wordless night,
A lamb cropping the awful grasses, grazed;
Earthward the trouble lies, where strikes his light
At dawn industrious Man, and unamazed
Goes forth to plough, flinging a ribald stone
At all endeavour alien to his own.

Sonnet XIII describes a person viewing stars and planets through a telescope, with ordinary sounds of life on Earth in the background. During the night, which is “wordless” while most people sleep, Earth is peaceful at the center of the void of space (“at the void’s heart”). But this peace is only temporary because as soon as humans wake at dawn they begin fighting one another to promote their selfish interests.

Also, the phrase “Earthward the trouble lies” suggests the error of thinking that the stars, destiny, or any supernatural agents cause human misfortunes. As Edmund says in Shakespeare’s King Lear, “we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion” (1.2.123-125).

                    XIV
Him not the golden fang of furious heaven,
Nor whirling Aeolus on his awful wheel,
Nor foggy specter ramming the swift keel,
Nor flood, nor earthquake, nor the red tongue even
Of fire, disaster's dog—him, him bereaven
Of all save the heart's knocking, and to feel
The air upon his face: not the great heel
Of headless Force into the dust was driven.
These sunken cities, tier on tier, bespeak
How ever from the ashes with proud beak
And shining feathers did the phoenix rise,
And sail, and send the vulture from the skies . . .
That in the end returned; for Man was weak
Before the unkindness in his brother's eyes.

The speaker reiterates that humanity’s will to survive always enables our species to survive, repeatedly rising phoenix-like from the ruins of civilizations. Yet the threat of humanity’s extinction (i.e., passing into the void) always returns because its survival instinct is undermined by people’s unkindness to one another.  In Z for Zachariah, humanity’s survival depends on the last two survivors of a nuclear war being sympathetic towards one another. Ann’s desire for complete control over her life gives her an irrational fear that the last man will enslave her, leading her to hide in a cave as he approaches. She is then willing to let him die rather than put her freedom at risk by coming out of hiding to warn him of a radioactive stream. Such a beginning does not bode well for humanity’s survival.

                    XV
Now sets his foot upon the eastern sill
Aldeberan, swiftly rising, mounting high,
And tracks the Pleiads down the crowded sky,
And drives his wedge into the western hill;
Now for the void sets forth, and further still,
The questioning mind of man . . . that by and by
From the void's rim returns with swooping eye,
Having seen himself into the maelstrom spill.
Blench not, O race of Adam, lest you find
In the sun's bubbling bowl anonymous death,
Or lost in whistling space without a mind
To monstrous Nothing yield your little breath:
You shall achieve destruction where you stand,
In instimate conflict, at your brother's hand.

The speaker describes human curiosity about space and warns against fear of venturing beyond Earth, since we will otherwise finally be swallowed by the sun or destroy ourselves on this planet. The astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has expressed the same views:

“Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”

(Winnipeg Free Press 11/19/2011)

                    XVI
Alas for Man, so stealthily betrayed,
Bearing the bad cell in him from the start,
Pumping and feeding from his healthy heart
That wild disorder never to be stayed
When once established, destined to invade
With angry hordes the true and proper part,
Till Reason joggles in the headman's cart,
And Mania spits from every balustrade.
Would he had searched his closet for his bane,
Where lurked the trusted ancient of his soul,
Obsequious Greed, and seen that visage plain;
Would he had whittled treason from his side
In his stout youth and bled his body whole,
Then had he died a king, or never died.

Sonnet XVI describes the problem of human selfishness most explicitly, identifying it as an innate trait (“the bad cell in him from the start”) and a passion (“wild disorder”) that destroys the capacity to reason, replacing it with “Mania.” Reason is viewed as “the true and proper part” of human nature, meaning perhaps that it is the main guide to truth and the aspect that most distinguishes humans from other animals. Further, humanity’s bane is defined as “Obsequious Greed,” in which greed is used as a synonym for selfishness. It is called “obsequious” because it always flatters the ego, slavishly serving solely personal opinions or desires.

                    XVII
Only the diamond and the diamond's dust
Can render up the diamond unto Man;
One and invulnerable as it began
Had it endured, but for the treacherous thrust
That laid its hard heart open, as it must,
And ground it down and fitted it to span
A turbaned brow or fret an ivory fan,
Lopped of its stature, pared of its proper crust.
So Man, by all the wheels of heaven unscored,
Man, the stout ego, the exuberant mind
No edge could cleave, no acid could consume,
Being split along the vein by his own kind,
Gives over, rolls upon the palm abhorred,
Is set in brass on the swart thumb of Doom.

Here the speaker likens humans to diamonds. Just as only a diamond is hard enough to cut diamond, the greatest threat to the survival of humanity’s “stout ego” is its own kind.

In Z for Zachariah, Ann and Loomis destroy their own and humanity’s chances of survival because of their selfish preoccupation with their own ideas and desires. Though both act selfishly at times, Ann seems more at fault because her reasoning is repeatedly undermined or distorted by irrational fear. Moreover, although Loomis later uses force to get Ann’s cooperation, it is clear he wants her companionship and hopes they can save humanity from extinction. And, as Ann realizes too late, Loomis’s efforts to control her are a direct response to her denial of companionship.

                    XVIII
Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea,
That falls incessant on the empty shore,
Most various man, cut down to spring no more;
Before his prime, even in his infancy
Cut down, and all the clamor that was he,
Silenced; and all the riveted pride he wore,
A rusted iron column whose tall core
The rains have tunneled like an aspen tree.
Man, doughty Man, what power has brought you low,
That heaven itself in arms could not persuade
To lay aside the lever and the spade
And be as dust among the dusts that blow?
Whence, whence the broadside? Whose the heavy blow?
Strive not to speak, poor scattered mouth; I know.

Finis.