Collected Works (Vol. III)

VARIOUS MEASURES II! VARIOUS MEASURES THE TOWER OF TOIL. (LA TOUR DE TRAVAIL.) THE old sun rolls; the old earth spins ; Incessant labour bends the stars. Hath not enough of woes and sins Passed? Who shall efface their senseless scars ? One makes, one mars. The eons foil All purpose ; rise, O Tower of Toil. Rise in thy radiance to proclaim The agony of the earth alive ! Stand by the sea, a marble flame, A lighthouse wedded to an hive! Still upward strive! O tower, arise An endless spiral to the skies ! Stand on the weather-beaten coast A flaming angel in the noon ; A silver, fascinated ghost In midnight’s revel with the moon 3 In silent swoon be still ! the spoil Of years is thine, O Tower of Toil. Let day, a glowing vigour, male ; And night, a virgin bowed and curled, Stand at the foot; their ardours pale Systole and diastole of the world ! With life impearled (their eyes absorb) They visibly sustain the orb. Then let the tower in seven tiers Rise in its splendour marmorean, Unite the chill divided years In plain perception of the zeon. Cry clear the pean! Its tunes recoil About thy flanks, O Tower of Toil. Below be miners fashioned fair, And all that labour in the sea Sepulchred from the ambient air, A fatal weird of dole to dree. No time to be, no light to live. Earth’s need to these hath hope to give. Above be various shapes of labour, The bodily strength, the manual skill ; They shape the anvil and the sabre, The ploughshare and the bolt; they fill The myriad will of brains that boil: Their fame be thine, O Tower of Toil ! Here set the travailers of land ; Here the young shepherd, fluteless now ; The mariner with tarry hand ; The clerk, with pale and foolish brow, His brain bought cheap for brainless grind: The bloodless martyr of the mind ! Grow up the grades, O godlike hand, Rodin, most rightly named ‘ August”! Thy splendid sons and daughters stand Obedient to the master ‘‘ must.” The decadent dust thy spells assoil ; Death lives in this, thy Tower of Toil. Grow up the grades! record the tasks These arduous phantoms have achieved! The growth of mind to mortals asks A power not swift to be believed. What bosoms heaved ere Nature’s age From monkey-man deduced the sage ! So be thy spiral tower the type Of higher convolutions drawn From hunger’s woe and murder’s gripe And lust’s revulsion to the dawn Of days that spawn on holier soil Thy loftier sons, O Tower of Toil. There is a flower of native light That springs eternal on the earth. Carve us, O master-hand, aright That ecstasy of pain and mirth, A baby’s birth! That prize of fear Engrave upon the loftiest tier !