Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.
The StatuesLaurence Binyon (18691943)
T
That to the sound of laughter glide!
O glad ones of the evening street,
Behold what forms are at your side!
Pass by with laughter, labour done;
But these within their durance stay;
Their travail sleeps not with the sun.
Their patient attitudes maintain;
Your triumphing bright course attend,
But from your eager ways abstain.
A moment turn from light distress,
And see how Fate on these hath wrought,
Who yet so deeply acquiesce.
The maim’d, the mute, the halt, the blind,
Condemn’d in hopeless hope to seek
The thing which they shall never find.
In masks of perishable mould:
Their souls a changing flesh arrays,
But they are changeless from of old.
But silence wraps their thoughts around.
On them, like snow, the ages fall;
Time muffles all this transient sound.
By Tigris, and his flag unfurl’d,
And forth his summons proudly sent
Into the new unconquer’d world;
Through Memphis and her bending slaves,
Or first the Tyrian gazed abroad
Upon the bright vast outer waves;
To the young glory of Babylon
Foreknew no ending; even then
Innumerable years had flown
Necessity, the sculptor, took,
And in her spacious meaning plann’d
These forms, and that eternal look;
These soft, unfathomable eyes,
Gazing from darkness, like a star;
These lips, whose grief is to be wise.
The growing statue rises fair,
She from immortal patience hew’d
The limbs of ever-young despair.
It hath not them far-off allured.
All things that we have yet to fear
They have already long endured.
Than hath ere now befallen these,
Whose gaze is as an opening door
On wild interminable seas.
With full joy haste thee to be fill’d,
And out of moments brief and sweet
Thou shalt a power for ages build.
What strength is in thy kind! With pain
Immortal bow’d, these mortals weak
Gentle and unsubdued remain.