All the World Was Broken [dactylic pentameter version]

All the World Was Broken [dactylic pentameter version]

Light and more light: in the dawning of days it was kindled;

Upward on weightless and luminous pinions God sent them,

Barbary doves in their beauty and confident ravens,

Great-winged condors majestically circling heaven.

Over the broad and immeasurable grasslands he set there

Wild sheep ranging, and bison of powerful shoulder,

Also the forests with splendid eucalyptus standing,

Firs everlasting and dark with their purple-tipped cones there.

Then he apportioned the oceans and measured their limits,

Called for the rainfall and cast to the deepest abysses

White whales moving and starfish with silvery flecking.

Light and more light: then again on the sixth day he formed Man,

Giving to him as his portion the care of creation,

Keeping and guarding the earth in its manifold richness,

Tending the vine and releasing the bird from entanglement,

Comforting calves brought low by the sorrow of orphanhood,

Sparing the old hen and showing compassion through labour.

Thus by responding with excellence unto his duty,

Man would be raised and perfected in worth through his actions,

Raising his race in like measure and gaining through virtue

Power to fashion anew yet more worlds in the future.

Sooner than hoped all the vigilant angels cried warning.

Man had run wild like a colony teeming with microbes,

Growing and spreading within a investigator's vessel,

Forming and swarming across the jellied agaric surface.

Forests of fir and of towering pine were consumed there,

Lofty eucalyptus becoming a funeral pyre.

Whales were dismembered; the condor drifted in oil-slicks;

Soon the seas emptied and all of the air became tainted.

Broken was all of the world, and God grieved at his making;

Troubled in heart that mankind had become so corrupted.

Man, having fallen before, yet descended still farther,

Till there remained not a remnant of world or of creature,

Nor any trace of mankind, whose ultimate offspring

Dreamed only dimly of settling the far-distant starfields.

Though there remained with God still the power of creation,

Never thereafter he fashioned another world wholly,

Having lost faith in the justice and claims of judgement.

Then the enormous cosmos grew colder and darker;

One after one all the stars were extinguished forever.