Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BUILDER AND HIS TOOLS, by SAMUEL VALENTINE COLE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BUILDER AND HIS TOOLS, by                    
First Line: Nations arise and fall
Last Line: The question and the answer might be heard.
Subject(s): Judgments; Law & Lawyers; Missionaries & Missions; Attorneys


I

NATIONS arise and fall:
One law decides it all,—
To serve the Builder's purpose if they can.
He takes them up for tools,
Or lays them down, as rules
The moment's need in furtherance of His plan.

With varied aims and strife
And thousand-summered life,
Each one at last achieves some separate goal,
Which, when achieved, afar
Looks simple as a star
And fitted to its place within the whole.

II

The Builder raised His hand,
And there was Greece, as planned,
Launching her ships to peer through all the seas:
Heroic deeds along
With Homer's noble song;
Temples, and oracles, and Socrates.

For what, you ask, designed?
To wake the slumbering mind
And set a hunger in the soul, forsooth:
To all men's hopes and fears,
Across the waste of years,
Greece voiced the timeless question, "What is truth?"

III

Again the Builder's sign,
And David's royal line
Bare down the wrathful age its tiny spark,
Close-shielding it, as one,
Where the wild breezes run,
Might shield an only candle in the dark:

Till, grown to full desire
As heaven's great altar-fire,
The spark shone through the world in gentle ruth:
This people for all time
The answer gave sublime,
In giving Him who said, "I am the truth."

IV

Hebrew and Greek were done;
Builder and work went on:
Rome, lifted on her hills, began to trace
The wrong of lawless might,
The lawful might of right,
In laws she laid on all the human race.
Unconscious instrument,
Toward such a mission bent,
Rome called the world to order by her word,
That then and evermore,
All lands and waters o'er,
The question and the answer might be heard.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net