Frederick Philip Grove
THOUGHTS
(IM 1-14)

---

e-Edition by Gaby Divay
© August 2007

University of Manitoba Libraries	FPG & FrL Collections	University of Manitoba Archives

THE VOICE[49] by Frederick Philip Grove I. "Stop!" cried a voice from the revolving spheres As, insolent, beyond man's goal I flew. "Give your accounting! Long are your arrears: "Stand now and speak! What is this world to you?" "This universe?" I said. "A scene too small "To limit aspiration and desire. "This earth, explored, is but a deadened ball "That rolls its orbit, soon to fag and tire. "A continent gives space to travel o'er "And fill the leisure of a holiday. "An ocean is a link from shore to shore: "That I have crossed it, is not much to say. "What else were life? I was a rover bent "On seeing all things that this earth affords. "And, having seen, I scaled the firmament "To pierce the air where but[50] the eagle lords. "And, home again, I'll set up glass and glass-- "To spy into the realms of distant stars "Or isolate the atom from its mass. "This world?                    A synonym for prison bars!" II. "Stop!" cried the voice again.                                         And there attached Themselves to me two souls from out a throng. I tarried. Were these two in flight well matched? They were. Exultant cried I, "Come along!" And on we flew and circled through the air; Where no one followed; for the nourishment Which mortal lungs demand was there too rare. But we soared, equipoised, our powers unspent. III. A third time, from on high, that voice cried, "Stop!" And this time did I tremble; for its breath Hissed with a twang. Thus does an arrow drop From off the string when it is winged with death. Omit what then ensued.[51] It matters not. We are but motes of dust that flit and meet. My world is bounded now: a flowered plot Delimits it, sixteen by sixteen feet. In Memoriam 10