 | Songs of Consolation |  |
14
PERFECTIBILITY.
1
BURIED cities in the far forgotten lands;Aztec citadels, in tropic leafage drowned;
Ancient kingdom upon kingdom underground,
Ninefold silted in the arid Afric sands;
By the lonely Alleghany river-strands
Mute memorials of past peoples, mound on mound;
Giant bones of bygone races, silence-bound,
From the Scythian deserts lifting lifeless hands;
In the Orient and the Occidental climes,
Where the alligator basks to day and gapes,
Where the blood-snakes in the cactus-tangle twine,
Where the banyans are alive with babbling apes,
Once Republics brawled and prated, of old times,
Once kings banqueted, queens quaffed the funeral wine.
2
One by one they fared and flourished, waxed and waned,To earth's bosom till at last they must return;
Of their ashes in Thought's tutelary urn
Not a trace to hold them memoried remained.
On their bones new kingdoms rose, new cultures reigned,
Arts, philosophies, religions mild and stern,
Lived their lives and to the Silence in their turn
Passed and perished at the term Fate-foreordained.
Passed and perished into nothing are they all;
Yea, their very names are faded from Time's page.
Like the leaves, that to the earth in Autumn fall
And to earth returned, new leafage foster must,
15
Others building of their dumb and breathless dust.
3
Were the Fates not speech-and sense-less, eyes and ears,Thought and apprehension lacking, tongue and brain,
In the voices of the thunder and the rain
We should hear them at our idle smiles and tears
Mock, our baseless hopes and no less baseless fears;
They would scoff to scorn our sorry strife in vain
And our nights and days were rounded for refrain
With the loud sardonic laughter of the spheres.
But of all the things that stir the stars to scorn,
Had they ears to mark and note our insect-hum,
Sure our talk of foul made fair in days to come,
Of perfection drawing nearer day by day,
Ours, a breath of life who live and pass away,
Most must move to mirth the powers of Night and Morn.
4
When of those who have foregone us to the Goal,Of the million million peoples, that have been
And have passed, their names forgot, to the Unseen,
We bethink us, we a pin-point in Life's whole,
Who to-morrow, with our every joy and dole,
Pass for ever, two eternities between,
Yet of Progress and To-be to prate o'erween,
In our spirit's ear we hark from pole to pole
How the Soul, that dureth dateless in each star,
From the shifts of Life and Death alternate free,
Part for ever of the things which live and are,
Ever present, quit of Past and of To-be,
Laughs to scorn our idle talk of worlds afar
And our prate of man's perfectibility.
| Songs of Consolation | |