Classic Poem

The life of memory concerned me next.
The doomsday-book kept by our kind was neglected,
And the names were becoming objects of envy.
Men disfigured the text.
So the great died. No great name remained unvexed.
When I looked up the name of Nimrod I found him dead.
There was nothing where Pericles had once been written:
Where was Aletho, where Dion? They had forgotten Palamed.
Where was Argisilaus in the clamours of machinery?
Lost I found. It was the same with all the rest.
I persevered but found Scipio the place-name for ruin,
The remorse of Timoleon that made history deny him the palm of the soldier
But made him a model to rebuke the martial mind, languished in a new shadow
Thrown by adverse anonymous legions, bent on forgetting
Any names but aliases of the raceless, the split-men, untaught, unsexed.
I saw the mild morning of Solon being blotted
By the new night, affecting the solar reversal,
Or principles of some fatal irreversible eclipse.
All the gentleness of the western awakening was challenged by barbarous sects.
I bid farewell to the still ambered cheeks of the colossi of the greek horizon,
So mildly wise with such noble proportion and moderation.
Rome was a speck, a star. Our day I knew was completed.
There would soon be not even the haggard stone that Time erects.