Explore "Last of All" by Gilbert Parker on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Wave, walls to seaward, / Storm-clouds to leeward, / Beaten and blown by the winds of the West, / Sail we encumbered / Past isles unnumbered, / But never to greet the green island of Rest.
Lips that now tremble, / Do you dissemble / When you deny that the human is best?
Love, the evangel, / Finds the Archangel -- / Is that a truth when this may be a jest?
Star-drifts that glimmer / Dimmer and dimmer, / What do ye know of my weal or my woe?
Was I born under / The sun or the thunder?
What do I come from, and where do I go?
Rest, shall it ever / Come? Is endeavour / Still a vain twining and twisting of cords?
Is faith but treason; / Reason, unreason, / But a mechanical weaving of words?
What is the token, / Ever unbroken, / Swept down the spaces of querulous years, -- / Weeping or singing -- / That the Beginning / Of all things is with us, and sees us, and hears?
What is the token?
Bruised and broken, / Bend I my life to a blossoming rod?
Shall then the worst things / Come to the first things, / Finding the best of all, last of all, God?