Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/65

 The aqueducts, the theatres, the quais,

Of all the peoples and of all the times,

Rise on the sky in broken silhouette

Of ruin, or in pride of living use:

The diverse stages of a thousand clans

Of this and other times; some, hives remote

And local whose forgotten murmur rose

In wars obscure and civic jubilation

Some several centuries and died away,

Bequeathing brooding pillars to the silence

That so succeeded; some, imperial lands

Whose strayers probed the gulfs of distant seas,

Whose legions woke the echoes of far isles,

And whose excitement in the blaze of day

Preoccupied the planet for an age,

Bridging oblivion with projected thought

And rolling back the muffling floods of death

With scaling dreams and song of stellar span,

Whose tumult in the silence of the sky,

Whose order in the gardens of the sun

No less was gulfed in peace, to leave its stones

Gouged with the indecipherable runes

Wherewith man passing all unwittingly

Lays his Hand on the eternal. And I saw

Besides these, occupying earth's horizons

The towers around which teem in myriads

The living, in far corners of the earth

Or here at hand, standing like lighthouses

Above the generations as they surge,—

The stages of the peoples, streets and fields,

Bastions and fortresses and masonries,

Whereto acceding from the mysterious ports

Of birth, uncounted souls take up their place,

Appropriating there with tower and spire

The attachments of their forebears, and their faiths,

To love and hate, traffic and fight and die,

Ruled by the ascendency of heritage

In their small cosmos, and from birth to death 59