Doubt not that there shall rest aloft in time
A coral structure from our minute lives
Which towering ever as our seas subside
And sanctified by thought shall tell the races
Of other epochs that our submerged days
And straitened thought through prayer and toil and blood
Yet drew on God Who working o’er our heads
Transmuted imperfection into art
And built up glory from relinquished dreams
And made of clay memorial to stilled prayer,
Giving our silted graves power in the light,
Our dusted mouths voice in the upper air.
Yet every building shall be razed, nor shall
There rest one stone upon another placed
By our primeval days, for in the time
Of consummation such communities
Of worship, and such habitations
Shall rise, that all our most ethereal spires,
Our flame-transmuted monuments shall seem
But lead to gold or clay to alabaster;
Then shall tinged cities rise whose contours sweep
Harmonious with the lineaments of heaven,
Proportionate to nature, and of hues
That melt into the suffused tints of dawn,
Wherein a holier race shall walk in peace,
Sharers, by faith acquired through our stress,
In treasuries of splendour past our guess,
In whose deep hearts our pain and joy shall live,
As in their airiest temples, their sublimest towers
There shall rest token of our humbler shafts
In line and curve inbuilt into their art,
Our hope and aim ingrown into their faiths.
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