Artemis to Actæon (1909)/A Torchbearer
A TORCHBEARER
Great cities rise and have their fall; the brassThat held their glories moulders in its turn,Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,And ever on the palimpsest of earthImpatient Time rubs out the word he writ.But one thing makes the years its pedestal,Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and clapsA skyward wing above its epitaph—The will of man willing immortal things.
The ages are but baubles hung uponThe thread of some strong lives—and one slight wristMay lift a century above the dust;For Time,The Sisyphean load of little lives,Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.But who are these that, linking hand in hand,Transmit across the twilight waste of yearsThe flying brightness of a kindled hour?Not always, nor alone, the lives that searchHow they may snatch a glory out of heavenOr add a height to Babel; oftener they That in the still fulfilment of each day'sPacific order hold great deeds in leash,That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasksHide the attempered blade of high emprise,And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.
So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the callOf one rare moment all the daily storeOf joy distilled from the acquitted task,And that deliberate rashness which bespeaksThe pondered action passed into the blood;So swift to harden purpose into deedThat, with the wind of ruin in his hair,Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,Poured all in one libation to the truth,A brimming flood whose drops shall overflowOn deserts of the soul long beaten downBy the brute hoof of habit, till they springIn manifold upheaval to the sun.
Call here no high artificer to raiseHis wordy monument—such lives as theseMake death a dull misnomer and its pompAn empty vesture. Let resounding lives Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaultsAnd make the grave their spokesman—such as heAre as the hidden streams that, underground,Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine,Or as spring airs that bring through prison barsThe scent of freedom; or a light that burnsImmutably across the shaken seas,Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.