Talk:Evolution (Smith)

Points of clarification:

I had this poem in a book of poetry, and there were some differences ...

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland *dank* And fitted it, head *to* haft; Than I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the mammoth came to drink; Through brawn *and bone* I *drave* the stone And slew him upon the brink.

I've starred the differences. Note that the poem flows slightly better in this form ... and then there's the beautiful use of the archaic "drave".

In the next section, I have, "the clan came *trooping* in."

Finally, a major difference: in the book I had (can't remember the title, darn it), after the line:

"And the ox-wain creaks o'er the buried caves Where the mummied mammoths are."

there was this:

"For we know that the clod, by the grace of God, Will quicken with voice and breath; And we know that Love, with gentle hand, Will beckon from death to death. And so, as we linger at luncheon here O'er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole -- and I, a fish!"

I would give my eye-teeth to learn if these differences are correct, but this is the way I learned this lovely poem.

—unsigned comment by CaptainFossil (talk) .

Some info

I was aware that there were a few notable variants in some early publications of the poem, and there may be more that have since occured. Here is some of the information I have been able to gather.

Early printing history:

• First printing, in The New York Herald in 1895; (did not then include quatrains 15 -19, 25 and 26)
• Second printing in The New York Journal amidst a page of advertisements. No date as yet found, and no copies are known to survive.
• Published in The Scrap Book magazine, edited by Frank A. Munsey, in 1906
• Published in Evolution : A Fantasy (1909) (same version as in The Scrap Book magazine) : Downloadable PDF — though pages are not shown in web browsers, the pdf contains images of all the pages)

Additional lines not found in any previous known publication occurred in the version published in The Book of Poetry (1927) edited by Edwin Markham:

For we know the clod, by the grace of God
Will quicken with voice and breath;
And we know that Love, with gentle hand
Will beckon from death to death.

It is not known.whether these lines existed in the second newspaper publication, of which there are no known copies, nor whether they had been originally edited out by Smith or by some other editors.

Other than the inclusion of these additional lines I tend to prefer the wording of the 1909 version, especially the fuller last line ("Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole and I was a fish" rather than the more clipped "Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole — and I, a fish!" ~ Kalki 13:50, 8 May 2007 (UTC)