Read Online Collected Poems by William Alexander Percy - Free Book Online Page B

goldenest!
                                            Gone, all gone thy gold,
    Save where the rhythm of the ripened fields
                   Sweeps mellowing to the sea;
    Save where the lonely temples lift their pride,
        And on their maimed and desecrated fronts
        The evening light lays heavenly pure hands.
    Gone thy gold; thy beauty, childless, gone;
    Gone alike the strugglers and the strife.
    Only the bland, unflashing blue, the Libyan,
                   Holds yet its immemorial loveliness.
                   Thus from the lofty temple steps at gaze,
                             My thoughts came faltering.
    But my proud heart leaped up in glittering mail
    And called:
                                            Tho’ the gods be dead or never were;
    Tho’ death blow out the flame and soul be dust;
                             Tho’ generation follow generation
        Level, no higher footing gained, no hope
        Broad day will sometime flood the race
        Upon some mountain won with agony;
    Tho’ all dissolve and leave no mist of gold —
        Yet vision only and the strife therefor
                   Shall I accept as life!
    If here, across this present’s windy peak, I gaze
                   Back, back across the infinite years,
                   And forward thro’ the infinite to be —
                   Above the human rabble, past the soft
    Guzzlers against the fertile breasts of life,
                   I see, I do behold, how proudly, them
    Whom blind nobility, heroic uselessness,
    Impelled to scorn all acquiescence, brute
    And easy; to strike to the blood’s last crimson for
                             The dream of their own making;
                   Defenders, tho’ creators, of their own
                   Divinity; soldiers in sweat, in blood,
                                            Before the mouth of death.
                   So long as one remain, but one,
    To shout the battle cry and take no quarter,
    So long the velvet ease of life is infamous,
    So long I stand with him and beard the world!
    Girgenti, O Girgenti, vanished all thy sons!
        And only spring with equal glory spreads
    Across thy hills its billows of deep bloom.
                             Empedocles, thy loveliest, is gone;
        And Dædalus is dead; his wings no more
        Shall darken up the east or shake the sea;
        Nor any make return whose name thy mouth
                   Smiled to repeat. Yet not to them
                   My heart gives hail across the grave.
                             Oh, not to them whose heralding
                   Sufficient heaven gave to their attempt.
                   But to thy sons, that, silently,
                                            Oblivion-crowned,
                   Battled as tho’ the very gods made part,
        And from their golden ramparts called applause.
                   Them do I hail across the heavy mold;
        And them unborn, foredoomed to like red death,
    Whose swords submit not chance, nor fate, nor flesh.…
        My brothers, proud, tho’ unworthy, let me stand with you
                   In stubborn rank against the wall of doom,
                   Opposing meek acceptance of the world;
        Scornful of scorn and vileness and black sloth;
        Battling, we know not why; dying, we care not how;
        Glimpsing our kinship with the farther stars;
                             Defeated always —