The aqueducts, the theatres, the quais,
Of all the peoples and of all the times,
Rise on the sky in broken silhouette
Of ruin, or in pride of living use:
The diverse stages of a thousand clans
Of this and other times; some, hives remote
And local whose forgotten murmur rose
In wars obscure and civic jubilation
Some several centuries and died away,
Bequeathing brooding pillars to the silence
That so succeeded; some, imperial lands
Whose strayers probed the gulfs of distant seas,
Whose legions woke the echoes of far isles,
And whose excitement in the blaze of day
Preoccupied the planet for an age,
Bridging oblivion with projected thought
And rolling back the muffling floods of death
With scaling dreams and song of stellar span,
Whose tumult in the silence of the sky,
Whose order in the gardens of the sun
No less was gulfed in peace, to leave its stones
Gouged with the indecipherable runes
Wherewith man passing all unwittingly
Lays his Hand on the eternal. And I saw
Besides these, occupying earth's horizons
The towers around which teem in myriads
The living, in far corners of the earth
Or here at hand, standing like lighthouses
Above the generations as they surge,—
The stages of the peoples, streets and fields,
Bastions and fortresses and masonries,
Whereto acceding from the mysterious ports
Of birth, uncounted souls take up their place,
Appropriating there with tower and spire
The attachments of their forebears, and their faiths,
To love and hate, traffic and fight and die,
Ruled by the ascendency of heritage
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