Poems of the Past and the Present. Thomas Hardy

      These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry

      Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;

      Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome

      Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

      And cracking frieze and rotten metope

      Express, as though they were an open tome

      Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;

      “Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”

      And yet within these ruins’ very shade

      The singing workmen shape and set and join

      Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin

      With no apparent sense that years abrade,

      Though each rent wall their feeble works invade

      Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

      I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day,

      And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,

      And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,

      Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

      She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,

      But each and the whole – an essence of all the Nine;

      With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,

      A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

      “Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she.

      “Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy!

      I worship each and each; in the morning one,

      And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

      “To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth

      Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?”

      – “Be not perturbed,” said she.  “Though apart in fame,

      As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

      – “But my loves go further – to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,

      The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim —

      Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!”

      – “Nay, wight, thou sway’st not.  These are but phases of one;

      “And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,

      One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be —

      Extern to thee nothing.  Grieve not, nor thyself becall,

      Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!”

            Who, then, was Cestius,

            And what is he to me? —

      Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous

            One thought alone brings he.

            I can recall no word

            Of anything he did;

      For me he is a man who died and was interred

            To leave a pyramid

            Whose purpose was exprest

            Not with its first design,

      Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest

            Two countrymen of mine.

            Cestius in life, maybe,

            Slew, breathed out threatening;

      I know not.  This I know: in death all silently

            He does a kindlier thing,

            In beckoning pilgrim feet

            With marble finger high

      To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,

            Those matchless singers lie.

            – Say, then, he lived and died

            That stones which bear his name

      Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;

            It is an ample fame.

            A spirit seems to pass,

         Formal in pose, but grave and grand withal:

         He contemplates a volume stout and tall,

      And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

            Anon the book is closed,

         With “It is finished!”  And at the alley’s end

         He turns, and soon on me his glances bend;

      And, as from earth, comes speech – small, muted, yet composed.

            “How fares the Truth now? – Ill?

         – Do pens but slily further her advance?

         May one not speed her but in phrase askance?

      Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

            “Still rule those minds on earth

         At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:

         ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world

      Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?”

      Thirty-two years since, up against the sun,

      Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight,

      Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,

      And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

      They were the first by whom the deed was done,

      And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight

      To that day’s tragic feat of manly might,

      As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

      Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon

      Thou