Chapter 302: Endless Forms

On the twenty-fourth of November, 1859, in London, A green book left John Murray's house in Albemarle Street. Charles Darwin was not in the shop. He was at Downe, in Kent, Waiting on word. Twelve hundred and fifty copies. The trade Took them that day. He had been more than twenty years Coming to the sentence. In July of 1837, in a notebook, He drew a branching figure and wrote above it, *I think*. He had sailed from Plymouth on the twenty-seventh of December, 1831, On the *Beagle*, under Robert FitzRoy, and for five years Collected a coast, a war, a forest, and the islands. He did not, on the black rock of the Galápagos, already know. He labelled what he could. The *Beagle* brought him home On the second of October, 1836. Then John Gould, in London, Told him the birds were not what the labels had said. The mockingbirds differed, island from island. The finches, Which he had not sorted, were one group. The tree began After the voyage, not on the beach. Then the long work: Barnacles, illness, the house at Downe, children born. On the twenty-eighth of June, 1858, Charles Waring Darwin, A baby, died of scarlet fever. Charles Darwin did not go, Three days later, to the room in London where two papers Were read to the Linnean Society, and the room did not Know what it had heard. He stayed with the fresh grave. The papers were his, and Alfred Russel Wallace's. Wallace Was in Ternate, in the islands. A letter from him, Written out of a fever, had reached Downe in June: The same branching, found alone. Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker would not wait, and would not Let one man's years be erased by another's letter, And so the two were read as one, and the afternoon passed Quietly. The shake came the next year, when the thing Was a book. Its title was not *Evolution*. It was The origin of species. The word *evolved* stands once, At the end, and not before. The close of it is grandeur: From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful And most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. He did not, in that book, tell the human line. He left one clause: light will be thrown on the origin of man And his history. The louder mouth came afterwards And said *monkeys*, and sold the cartoons. The book Said a quieter thing, and a much larger one. Not a single house, chosen and set down complete, With the rest of life as scenery around it. A tree. Every living body a continuation of the dead. Emma Darwin, his wife and his cousin, had feared For a long time that this thought would put a door Between them after death. She stayed. The fear is in The letters. It is not a joke, and his fear is not a joke: The fear of what the sentence does to a story In which one stock is made finished, and the others are backdrop. What he printed is the opposite of a private pedigree. No line is the line. The dead are not the property Of one family that can recite itself. They are the ground. Finch and sailor, the infant at Downe, the stranger In the temple yard, the ancestor with a name and the one With no stone. This calendar keeps their days. There is not much else it can be for. In 1859 the account was printed of how the living Are the dead, carried forward, changed, and still their children. Not a call to found a church. A natural history of descent. The Gaiad is young. The book is older than this calendar. The hill at Downe is older than the book. The dead are older than the hill. What the book gives this scripture is the ground under it: The family is not a figure of speech. It is the shape of life. Until that is granted, a day kept for the ancestors Is only a courtesy paid to a list. Grant the tree, and every day is someone's, And the someone is in you, or in the living world beside you, Or in both. Light will be thrown. It has been. The forms are not finished. They are being evolved. Keep the names. Keep the unnamed. They are one descent. From so simple a beginning, the endless forms. Say it over the days: the dead are not gone from the world. They are how the world goes on.