The Sheep in the Ruins

T

for Learned and Augustus Hand

You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you,
Stand with me a little by the walls
Or where the walls once were.
The bridge was here, the city further:
Now there is neither bridge nor town—
A doorway where the roof is down
Opens on a foot-worn stair
That climbs by three steps into empty air.
(What foot went there?)
Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples
Lives now but these flocks of sheep
Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath:
Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth.

Can none but sheep live where the walls go under?
Is man’s day over and the sheep’s begun?
And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill
Shrilling with melodious tongue—
Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair?
(What dust is this we sift upon our hair?)
Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz
Shall we sit weeping for the world that was
And curse god and so perish?
Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them?
Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches?

Consider, Oh consider what we are!
Consider what it is to be a man—
He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle;
Who discovers in his mouth, between his teeth, a word;
Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars— that burden;
Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone—
A girl’s shoulder, perfectly harmonious!

Even the talk of it would take us days together.
Marvels men have made, Oh marvels!—and our breath
Brief as it is: our death waiting—
Marvels upon marvels! Works of state—
The imagination of the shape of order!
Works of beauty—the cedar door
Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt!
Works of grace—
The ceremony at the entering of houses,
At the entering of lives: the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse!

Works of soul—
Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder:
Through the mid night to the stroke of one!
Works of grace! Works of wonder!
All this have we done and more—
And seen—what have we not seen?—

A man beneath the sunlight in his meaning:
A man, one man, a man alone.

In the sinks of the earth that wanderer has gone down.
The shadow of his mind is on the mountains.
The word he has said is kept in the place beyond
As the seed is kept and the earth ponders it.
Stones—even the stones remember him:
Even the leaves—his image is in them.
And now because the city is a ruin in the waste of air
We sit here and despair!
Because the sheep graze in the dying grove
Our day is over!
We must end
Because the talk around the table in the dusk has ended,
Because the fingers of the goddesses are found
Like marble pebbles in the gravelly ground
And nothing answers but the jackal in the desert,—
Because the cloud proposes, the wind says!

Because the sheep are pastured where the staring statues lie
We sit upon the sand in silence
Watching the sun go and the shadows change!

Listen, my friends, and you, all of you, strangers,
Listen, the work of man, the work of splendor
Never has been ended or will end.
Even where the sheep defile the ruined stair
And dogs are masters—even there
One man’s finger in the dust shall trace the circle.

Even among the ruins shall begin the work,
Large in the level morning of the light
And beautiful with cisterns where the water whitens,
Rippling upon the lip of stone, and spills
By cedar sluices into pools, and the young builders
String their plumb lines, and the well-laid course
Blanches its mortar in the sun, and all the morning
Smells of wood-smoke, rope-tar, horse-sweat, pitch-pine,
Men and the trampled mint leaves in the ditch.

One man in the sun alone
Walks between the silence and the stone:
The city rises from his flesh, his bone.

Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Jenny by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her, child!”—Mrs. Quickly Lazy laughing languid Jenny,
Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea,
Read Poem
0
167
Rating:

Summer Images by John Clare
John Clare
Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned,
Precedence takes of rosy fingered Spring;
And laughing Joy, with wild flowers prank'd, and crown'd,
A wild and giddy thing,
And Health robust, from every care unbound,
Come on the zephyr's wing,
And cheer the toiling clown.
Read Poem
0
119
Rating:

Sohrab and Rustum by Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
An Episode AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.
Read Poem
0
143
Rating:

Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough by Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
The village street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name,
And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks—
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Read Poem
0
140
Rating:

Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

II
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierc'd by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
Read Poem
0
156
Rating:

O Ye Tongues by Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
First Psalm

Let there be a God as large as a sunlamp to laugh his heat at you.

Let there be an earth with a form like a jigsaw and let it fit for all of ye.

Let there be the darkness of a darkroom out of the deep. A worm room.

Let there be a God who sees light at the end of a long thin pipe and lets it in.

Let God divide them in half.

Let God share his Hoodsie.

Let the waters divide so that God may wash his face in first light.
Read Poem
0
149
Rating:

Psalm 114 by Isaac Watts
Isaac Watts
Miracles Attending Israel’s Journey When Isr’el, freed from Pharaoh’s hand,
Left the proud tyrant and his land,
The tribes with cheerful homage own
Their king; and Judah was his throne.
Read Poem
0
107
Rating:

On Ukrainian Independence by Brodsky Joseph
Brodsky Joseph
Dear Charles XII, the Poltava battle Has been fortunately lost. To quote Lenin’s burring rattle, “Time will show you Kuzka’s mother”, ruins along the waste, Bones of post-mortem bliss with a Ukrainian aftertaste.
It’s not the green flag , eaten by the isotope , It’s the yellow-and-blue flying over Konotop , Made out of canvas – must be a gift from Toronto – Alas, it bears no cross, but the Khokhly don’t want to.
Oh, rushnyks and roubles, sunflowers in summer season!
Read Poem
0
272
Rating:

Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edwin Arlington Robinson
You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,
All most harmonious, — and out of his
Miraculous inviolable increase
Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like
Of olden time with timeless Englishmen;
And I must wonder what you think of him —
All you down there where your small Avon flows
By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman.
Some, for a guess, would have him riding back
To be a farrier there, or say a dyer;
Or maybe one of your adept surveyors;
Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.
Read Poem
0
149
Rating:

The War-song of Dinas Vawr by Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed's richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
Read Poem
0
144
Rating:

The Ivy Green by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,
That creepeth o’er ruins old!
Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,
In his cell so lone and cold.
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,
To pleasure his dainty whim:
And the mouldering dust that years have made
Is a merry meal for him.
Read Poem
0
111
Rating:

Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase;
Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him.

‘Thrice fairer than myself,’ thus she began,
Read Poem
0
207
Rating:

Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.—
Confess. St. August. Earth, ocean, air, belovèd brotherhood!
If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
Read Poem
0
143
Rating:

Contemplations by Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet
1
Sometime now past in the Autumnal Tide,
When Phoebus wanted but one hour to bed,
The trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,
Were gilded o’re by his rich golden head.
Their leaves and fruits seem’d painted but was true
Of green, of red, of yellow, mixed hew,
Rapt were my senses at this delectable view.

2
I wist not what to wish, yet sure thought I,
If so much excellence abide below,
How excellent is he that dwells on high?
Whose power and beauty by his works we know.
Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light,
Read Poem
0
172
Rating:

Lines Written Near San Francisco by Louis Simpson
Louis Simpson
I wake and feel the city trembling.
Yes, there is something unsettled in the air
And the earth is uncertain.

And so it was for the tenor Caruso.
He couldn’t sleep—you know how the ovation
Rings in your ears, and you re-sing your part.

And then the ceiling trembled
And the floor moved. He ran into the street.
Read Poem
0
180
Rating:

The Skull of Shakespeare by George Sterling
George Sterling
I
Without how small, within how strangely vast!
What stars of terror had their path in thee!
What music of the heavens and the sea
Lived in a sigh or thundered on the blast!
Here swept the gleam and pageant of the Past,
As Beauty trembled to her fate’s decree;
Here swords were forged for armies yet to be,
Read Poem
0
128
Rating:

Madeleine in Church by Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mew
Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint
Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
And one small candle shines, but not so faint
As the far lights of everlastingness,
I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day
Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
To something more like my own clay,
Not too divine;
Read Poem
0
187
Rating:

from The Prodigal: 10 by Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott
I

The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew
up from his path to settle in the sun-browned
branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos
with its relentless valve, a tiring sound,
not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song
of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes
though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought
Read Poem
0
115
Rating:

Hertha by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.

Before ever land was,
Before ever the sea,
Or soft hair of the grass,
Or fair limbs of the tree,
Or the fresh-coloured fruit of my branches, I was, and thy soul was in me.

First life on my sources
First drifted and swam;
Out of me are the forces
Read Poem
0
166
Rating:

from Gilgamesh: Tablet 11 by David Ferry
David Ferry
i

Gilgamesh spoke and said to the old man then:
"When I looked at you I thought that you were not

a man, one made like me; I had resolved
to challenge you as one might challenge a demon,

a stranger-adversary. But now I see
that you are Utnapishtim, made like me,

a man, the one I sought, the one from whom
Read Poem
0
141
Rating: