Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/123

Rh Seems small as insects,—one whose footstep jars

On some vast world-orb islanded by stars,—

May fling a stone and crush our earth to bits,

And all that men have builded by their wits?

"Ah, what a loss!" you say; "our bodies go,

But not our temples, statues, and the glow

Of glorious canvases; and not the pages

Our poets have illumed through myriad ages.

What boots the insect's loss? Another day

Will see the selfsame ant-hill and the play

Of light on dainty web the same. But blot

All human art from this terrestrial plot,

Something indeed would pass that nevermore

Would light the universe as once before!"

The spider's work is not original,—

You hold,—but what of ours? I fear that all

We do is just the same thing over and over.

Take Life: you have the woman and her lover;

'T is old as Eden; naught is new in that!

Take Building, and you reach ere long the flat

Nile desert sands, by way of France, Rome, Greece.

And there is poetry—our bards increase

In numbers, not in sweetness, not in force,

Since he, sublimest poet of this globe,

Forgotten now, poured forth the chant of Job—

Where Man with the Eternal holds discourse.

No, no! The forms may change, but even they

Come round again. Could we but truly scan it,

We'd find in the heavens some little, busy planet,

Whence all we are was borrowed. If to-day

The imagined giant flung his ponderous stone,

And we and all our far-stretched schemes were done,

His were a scant remorse and short-lived trouble,

Like mine for those small creatures in the stubble.