Classic Poem

I gazed on the disturbing Scene
As on a place where I had been,
Remembered from anterior birth,
Ere darkened by the life of earth,
Rent crags on the wild ground were strewed,
Ruins of that grey solitude;
Records were on their foreheads traced,
By time and tempest half effaced;
Strange mystic figures graved thereon
By hands whose very dust was gone;
Thoughts of old seers, their birth and breath
Lost in the infinite of death.
And amidst them, scattered wide,
Broken columns thrown, the pride
Once of palace, or of fane,
Mouldering to earth again;
The anatomy, laid bare
To the winds and stormy air,
Of the skeletons that towered
In their giant forms on high,
Ere destruction o'er them lowered;
Till looked in the open sky,
And the grass a mantle spread
Above the city of the dead.