In the Neolithic Age
 

    IN the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
        For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt.
    I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
        And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

    Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
        Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
    And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
        Were about me and beneath me and above.

    But a rival, of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré --
        By a hammer, grooved of dolomite, he fell.
    And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged below the heart
        Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

    Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting-dogs fed full,
        And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
    And I wiped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead,
        For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong."

    But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
        And he told me in a vision of the night: --
    "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
        "And every single one of them is right!"

         .      .      .      .      .      .       .

    Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
        Of whiter, weaker fresh and bone more frail; .
    And I stepped beneath Time's finger, once again a tribal singer,
        And a minor poet certified by Traill!

    Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow
        When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
    When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
        And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

    Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
        Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;
    Still we let our business slide -- as we dropped the half-dressed hide --
        To show a fellow-savage how to work.

    Still the world is wondrous large, -- seven seas from marge to marge --
        And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
    And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
        And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

    Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
        And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night: --
    "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
        "And -- every -- single -- one -- of -- them -- is -- right!"

        Rudyard Kipling