Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.

The Statues

Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)

TARRY a moment, happy feet,

That to the sound of laughter glide!

O glad ones of the evening street,

Behold what forms are at your side!

You conquerors of the toilsome day

Pass by with laughter, labour done;

But these within their durance stay;

Their travail sleeps not with the sun.

They, like dim statues without end,

Their patient attitudes maintain;

Your triumphing bright course attend,

But from your eager ways abstain.

Now, if you chafe in secret thought,

A moment turn from light distress,

And see how Fate on these hath wrought,

Who yet so deeply acquiesce.

Behold them, stricken, silent, weak,

The maim’d, the mute, the halt, the blind,

Condemn’d in hopeless hope to seek

The thing which they shall never find.

They haunt the shadows of your ways

In masks of perishable mould:

Their souls a changing flesh arrays,

But they are changeless from of old.

Their lips repeat an empty call,

But silence wraps their thoughts around.

On them, like snow, the ages fall;

Time muffles all this transient sound.

When Shalmaneser pitch’d his tent

By Tigris, and his flag unfurl’d,

And forth his summons proudly sent

Into the new unconquer’d world;

Or when with spears Cambyses rode

Through Memphis and her bending slaves,

Or first the Tyrian gazed abroad

Upon the bright vast outer waves;

When sages, star-instructed men,

To the young glory of Babylon

Foreknew no ending; even then

Innumerable years had flown

Since first the chisel in her hand

Necessity, the sculptor, took,

And in her spacious meaning plann’d

These forms, and that eternal look;

These foreheads, moulded from afar,

These soft, unfathomable eyes,

Gazing from darkness, like a star;

These lips, whose grief is to be wise.

As from the mountain marble rude

The growing statue rises fair,

She from immortal patience hew’d

The limbs of ever-young despair.

There is no bliss so new and dear,

It hath not them far-off allured.

All things that we have yet to fear

They have already long endured.

Nor is there any sorrow more

Than hath ere now befallen these,

Whose gaze is as an opening door

On wild interminable seas.

O Youth, run fast upon thy feet,

With full joy haste thee to be fill’d,

And out of moments brief and sweet

Thou shalt a power for ages build.

Does thy heart falter? Here, then, seek

What strength is in thy kind! With pain

Immortal bow’d, these mortals weak

Gentle and unsubdued remain.