Classic Poem

Hector , the captain bronzed, from simple fight
Passing to herd his trembling pallid host,
Scorned a blind beggar in the Skaian Gate,
Rattled a blade, then flung his rags a gift.
And, turning his void eyes to the black sun,
In price of alms the beggar prayed—‘Long light,
Loud name attend, O captain, your stern ghost:
Blind prayers may not be lost,
For of each one
Zeus keeps the count and token.’

Homer blind
Filled the huge world with Hector like a wind.
Comely, clean of the crust
Of Earth like bud from a root,
Blade clear of its-rust,
Smouldering crest afire,
Out of darkness. From dust
Iron risen in ire;
To a lifted horn's long note
Hector's afoot!

Words ghostly; the windy ones;
Thin tones:—outwearing stones
Tall Troy and Skaian Gate
Helen and Hector's hate—
Mouth of air; ghost of breath;
What a stone you have builded, what bronze
You have moulded, blown out of death!

Silence and stones
These two divide the world:
The builded majesty of things long said,—
The woven house we live in—crossed and strung
Over the void of deed.

But we, who peer and of our heart take heed,
Ourselves untuneable, unsung
Toss with the unborn and dead
In filmy limbo furled,
Mere apparitions.

He, the blind,
Who weaves the arches of the mind,
Shall granite find.
Since lofty Troy flamed out how long a fire!
Since Troy was built how grave and lean a toil
To raise his infinite city from its soil—
The pounded, charred,
Old splintered hopes and ashy acts of Man!

Sun-beat, moon-beam, star-stream
Now on his turrets gleam
His dome and spire;

Cool porch, wide stair, white air
And ark divine are there,
And graver gods than the Olympian,

The tender, the defined
Stones of the mind,
Carved by the hard
Cold chisel of dream.

But now—O deed not light
To grasp that granite right;
When, on each hand
The arch immutable is planned and spanned,

What inch, what ell of ground
Now can be found?
Or to that height
To lift a stone, what Might?

We do not build. We watch upon the wall
Our pigmy shadows fall!
Seek out thin images of hope and mockery
And lust; and doubt them all.

Or we in dusk descry
Huge terror pulsing by,
Shapes like Himalayan birds returning;
And lo! our Troy is burning.

But in the morn the crazy shadows flee
And soon ourselves are flown,
A smoke, a spray of the sea.

Alone
Remains the outlasting stone.
We have laboured and spun
A wasted shadowy thing, a tattered curtain
To drape life's draughty chambers.
But words are stones, and naked without woof
Make arch and starry roof.

It is certain,
That in the bravest building there's yet one,
Secret, who sits within,
Too bare for estimation, pity, praise,
And what he knows, none says.
Pass these things by. There's not a word so fine,
Or finely joined with pointed words of power,
Could name that sharpness.

What was Priam's goad?
What thoughts had Helen, shining from her tower?
Or Homer, tapping down his dusty road?
Darkness leaned upon the Skaian Gate,
And wind within the darkness.
Black tower on tower sank backward and was bleared
And Hector feared.
But he
Who crouched at Hector's knee,
The blind one in the gusty rags beside,
Searched with his void eyes nightward and replied
‘No tongue of the air, O prince, nor hungry speed
Of wind is here, nor footfall of the dark;
But wide the black plains dream, fold beyond fold.
Look from this arch—on the last fold a spark,
The moon's cold slip, an edge of dying gold
Quenches its blade upon the velvet rim
Of forests liquid-still as any lake.
But plumy mists the nearer valleys brim;
There, from unearthly pools the crags upbreak
Like pyramids serene of basalt, piled
Where with hushed feet move the immortal gods
And Troy is sleeping by their dreams beguiled,
Her windless porticoes and pale abodes
Obelisks, bastions, arks, and angry towers
Are like a lamp that, shrouded, holds and heeds
The name of Hector through the breathless hours
Revolving to the dawn.’

But through the formless city the wind hissed;
Prince Hector feared; and peered
Into the blackness,
And saw nothing but blackness, neither moon nor mist,
And in the dark, flown in the dark, his deeds.