Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/67

 Doubt not that there shall rest aloft in time

A coral structure from our minute lives

Which towering ever as our seas subside

And sanctified by thought shall tell the races

Of other epochs that our submerged days

And straitened thought through prayer and toil and blood

Yet drew on God Who working o’er our heads

Transmuted imperfection into art

And built up glory from relinquished dreams

And made of clay memorial to stilled prayer,

Giving our silted graves power in the light,

Our dusted mouths voice in the upper air.

Yet every building shall be razed, nor shall

There rest one stone upon another placed

By our primeval days, for in the time

Of consummation such communities

Of worship, and such habitations

Shall rise, that all our most ethereal spires,

Our flame-transmuted monuments shall seem

But lead to gold or clay to alabaster;

Then shall tinged cities rise whose contours sweep

Harmonious with the lineaments of heaven,

Proportionate to nature, and of hues

That melt into the suffused tints of dawn,

Wherein a holier race shall walk in peace,

Sharers, by faith acquired through our stress,

In treasuries of splendour past our guess,

In whose deep hearts our pain and joy shall live,

As in their airiest temples, their sublimest towers

There shall rest token of our humbler shafts

In line and curve inbuilt into their art,

Our hope and aim ingrown into their faiths.

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