The Higher Kinship
The Higher Kinship
Original Text
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1905), p. 274. PS 8455 A6A17. Robarts Library.
1Life is too grim with anxious, eating care
2 To cherish what is best. Our souls are scarred
3 By daily agonies, and our conscience marred
4By petty tyrannies that waste and wear.
5Why is this human fate so hard to bear?
6 Could we but live with hill-lakes silver-starred,
7 Or where the eternal silence leaneth toward
8The awful front of nature, waste and bare:
9Then might we, brothers to the lofty thought
10 And inward self-communion of her dream,
11Into that closer kin with love be brought,
12Where mighty hills and woods and waters, wan,
13Moon-paved at midnight or godlike at dawn,
14 Hold all earth's aspirations in their gleam.
Publication Start Year
1905
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
RPO 1998.
Rhyme