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In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and two-toed 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 Solutrй told the tribe my style was outrй--
By a hammer, grooved of dolomite, he fell.
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, beneath the heart
Of a mammothistic etcher at Crenelle.
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!"
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