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| ANEAR the centre of that northern crest | |
| Stands out level upland bleak and bare, | |
| From which the city east and south and west | |
| Sinks gently in long waves; and throned there | |
| An Image sits, stupendous, superhuman, | 5 |
| The bronze colossus of a winged Woman, | |
| Upon a graded granite base foursquare. | |
| |
| Low-seated she leans forward massively. | |
| With cheek on clench’d left hand, the forearm’s might | |
| Erect, its elbow on her rounded knee; | 10 |
| Across a clasp’d book in her lap the right | |
| Upholds a pair of compasses; she gazes | |
| With full set eyes, but wandering in thick mazes | |
| Of sombre thought beholds no outward sight. | |
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| Words cannot picture her; but all men know | 15 |
| That solemn sketch the pure and artist wrought | |
| Three centuries and three score years ago, | |
| With fantasies of his peculiar thought: | |
| The instruments of carpentry and science | |
| Scatte’d about her feet, in strange alliance | 20 |
| With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught; | |
| |
| Scales, hour-glass, bell, and magic-square above; | |
| The grave and solid infant perch’d beside, | |
| With open winglets that might bear a dove, | |
| Intent upon its tablets, heavy-eyed; | 25 |
| Her folded wings as of a mighty eagle | |
| But all too impotent to lift the regal | |
| Robustness of her earth-born strength and pride; | |
| |
| And with those wings, and that light | |
| Wreath which seems | 30 |
| To mock her grand head and the knotted frown | |
| Of forehead charged with baleful thoughts and dreams, | |
| The household bunch of keys, the house-wife’s gown | |
| Voluminous, indented, and yet rigid | |
| As if a shell of burnish’d metal frigid, | 35 |
| The feet thick-shod to tread all weakness down; | |
| |
| The comet hanging o’er the waste dark seas, | |
| The massy rainbow curv’d in front of it | |
| Beyond the village with the masts and trees; | |
| The snaky imp, dog-headed, from the Pit, | 40 |
| Bearing upon its batlike leathern pinions | |
| Her name unfolded in the sun’s dominions, | |
| The “MELENCOLIA” that transcends all wit. | |
| |
| Thus has the artist copied her, and thus | |
| Surrounded to expound her form sublime, | 45 |
| Her fate heroic and calamitous; | |
| Fronting the dreadful mysteries of Time, | |
| Unvanquish’d in defeat and desolation, | |
| Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration | |
| Of the day setting on her baffled prime. | 50 |
| |
| Baffled and beaten back she works on still, | |
| Weary and sick of soul she works the more, | |
| Sustain’d by her indomitable will: | |
| The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore, | |
| And all her sorrow shall be turn’d to labor, | 55 |
| Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre | |
| That mighty heart of ends bitter war. | |
| |
| But as if blacker night could dawn on night, | |
| With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarr’d, | |
| A sense more tragic than defeat and blight, | 60 |
| More desperate than strife with hope debarr’d, | |
| More fatal than the adamantine Never | |
| Encompassing her passionate endeavor, | |
| Dawn glooming in her tenebrous regard: | |
| |
| The sense that every struggle brings defeat | 65 |
| Because Fate holds no prize to crown success; | |
| That all the oracles are dumb or cheat | |
| Because they have no secret to expresses; | |
| That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain | |
| Because there is no light beyond the curtain; | 70 |
| That all is vanity and nothingness. | |
| |
| Titanic from her high throne in the north, | |
| That City’s sombre Patroness and Queen, | |
| In bronze sublimity she gazes forth | |
| Over her Capital of teen and threne, | 75 |
| Over the river with its isles and bridges, | |
| The marsh and moorland, to the stern rock-ridges, | |
| Confronting them with a coeval mien. | |
| |
| The moving moon and stars from east to west | |
| Circle before her in the sea of air; | 80 |
| Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest. | |
| Her subjects often gaze up to her there: | |
| The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance, | |
| The weak new terrors; all, renew’d assurance | |
| And confirmation of the old despair. | 85 |
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