Poems | ||
I.
The silence of a moonless nightThe path of time doth follow: moonless night
And starless tracks man's footsteps, with dim forms
Still crumbling back into the caverned past.
And thou the strangest legend wrought in stone
The huge rock-spectre of an earlier world,
Within that terrible darkness standest still,
A mystery now as then.
I shut my ears and hear
Through the far centuries the clang
Of Coptic hammers round thy limbs half-freed:
Slaves toiling in their blindness, slaves of fate,
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What inspiration or what sad resolve,—
Those laborers cheer that know not what they do?
Poems | ||