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I MEMPHIS and Karnak, Luxor, Thebes, the Nile: | |
| Of these your letters told; and I who read | |
| Saw room on dim horizons Egypt’s dead | |
| In march across the desert, mile on mile, | |
| A ghostly caravan in slow defile | 5 |
| Between the sand and stars; and at their head | |
| From unmapped darkness into darkness fled | |
| The gods that Egypt feared a little while. | |
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| There black against the night I saw them loom | |
| With captive kings and armies in array | 10 |
| Remembered only by their sculptured doom, | |
| And thought: What Egypt was are we to-day. | |
| Then rose obscure against the rearward gloom | |
| The march of Empires yet to pass away. | |
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II I looked in vision down the centuries | 15 |
| And saw how Athens stood a sunlit while | |
| A sovereign city free from greed and guile, | |
| The half-embodied dream of Pericles. | |
| Then saw I one of smooth words, swift to please, | |
| At laggard virtue mock with shrug and smile; | 20 |
| With Cleon’s creed rang court and peristyle, | |
| Then sank the sun in far Sicilian seas. | |
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| From brows ignoble fell the violet crown. | |
| Again the warning sounds; the hosts engage: | |
| In Cleon’s face we fling our battle gage, | 25 |
| We win as foes of Cleon loud renown; | |
| But while we think to build the coming age | |
| The laurel on our brows is turning brown. | |
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III We top the poisonous blooms that choke the state, | |
| At flower and fruit our flashing strokes are made, | 30 |
| The whetted scythe on stalk and stein is laid, | |
| But deeper must we strike to extirpate | |
| The rooted evil that within our gate | |
| Will sprout again and flourish, branch and blade, | |
| For only from within can ill be stayed | 35 |
| While Adam’s seed is unregenerate. | |
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| With zeal redoubled let our strength be strained | |
| To cut the rooted causes where they hold, | |
| Nor spend our sinews on the fungus mold | |
| When all the breeding marshes must be drained. | 40 |
| Be this our aim; and let our youth be trained | |
| To honor virtue more than place and gold. | |
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IV A hundred cities sapped by slow decay, | |
| A hundred codes and systems proven vain | |
| Lie hearsed in sand upon the heaving plain. | 45 |
| Memorial ruins mounded, still and gray; | |
| And we who plod the barren waste to-day | |
| Another code evolving, think to gain | |
| Surcease of man’s inheritance of pain | |
| And mold a state immune from evil’s sway. | 50 |
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| Not laws; but virtue in the soul we need, | |
| The old Socratic justice in the heart, | |
| The golden rule become the people’s creed | |
| When years of training have performed their part | |
| For thus alone in home and church and mart | 55 |
| Can evil perish and the race be freed. | |
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