| |
| BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans | |
| Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, | |
| The emptiness of ages in his face, | |
| And on his back the burden of the world. | |
| Who made him dead to rapture and despair, | 5 |
| A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, | |
| Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? | |
| Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? | |
| Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? | |
| Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? | 10 |
| Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave | |
| To have dominion over sea and land; | |
| To trace the stars and search the heavens for power. | |
| To feel the passion of Eternity? | |
| Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns | 15 |
| And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? | |
| Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf | |
| There is no shape more terrible than this— | |
| More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed— | |
| More filled with signs and portents for the soul— | 20 |
| More fraught with menace to the universe. | |
| |
| What gulfs between him and the seraphim! | |
| Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him | |
| Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? | |
| What the long reaches of the peaks of song, | 25 |
| The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? | |
| Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; | |
| Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop; | |
| Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, | |
| Plundered, profaned and disinherited, | 30 |
| Cries protest to the Judges of the World, | |
| A protest that is also prophecy. | |
| |
| O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, | |
| Is this the handiwork you give to God, | |
| This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? | 35 |
| How will you ever straighten up this shape; | |
| Touch it again with immortality; | |
| Give back the upward looking and the light; | |
| Rebuild in it the music and the dream; | |
| Make right the immemorial infamies, | 40 |
| Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? | |
| |
| O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, | |
| How will the Future reckon with this Man? | |
| How answer his brute question in that hour | |
| When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? | 45 |
| How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— | |
| With those who shaped him to the thing he is— | |
| When this dumb Terror shall reply to God, | |
| After the silence of the centuries? | |
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