Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, STONE DUST, by FRANK ERNEST HILL



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

STONE DUST, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The gods have not yet learned to fear the lover
Last Line: From a crumbling wall.
Subject(s): Dust; Love - Nature Of; Stones; Supernatural; Granite; Rocks


I

The gods have not yet learned to fear the lover.
The gods of windowed walls, uplifting high
Invisible bulk to stir the clouds, or swinging
In arcs of light and thunder through the sky --
How should the gods of granite walls discover
Between their caves and heights
A flake of dust with fire of dreams bringing
To walls and gods an end of days and nights?

II

The lover has not learned to hate the gods.
They are new gods, their soaring cubes are strange --
Their columned clay dark under columned steam,
Their roaring shafts of wheels and wire and rods.
The lover, in eternity of dream,
Answers not the moment's change,
Lets the stony ridges grow and gleam,
Lets the millions swarm and range.

III

The gods wall in the lover's dream with stone.
Of men the swift, hard gods have made a flow
Like driven water. They have paved its course.
They stem or speed it crying Stay or Go.
Down beds of granite, under ledges sown
With granite trunks, prisoned in its own roar,
Tossing among immensities with hoarse
Beating from stone of curb to bronze of door,
The flood of men goes lashing the gods' ways,
The pauseless flood of men goes down the stone
Grooves of the gods, dark-fevered in its maze,
Troubling the chiseled streets like dust wind-blown.

IV

The gods wall in the lover's dream with stone . . .
Their granite lifts a shadow to enfold
All jeweled words, all wordless music played
With an eye's gesturing of blue or gold.
Now they have edged with stone the blade
Of a bright seed that cannot rest,
The troubled builder that of dust has made
Sweet transient flesh, the soul's cry, the soul's quest.
He carved from chaos form, he drew from night
A flame, he made clear words from a blurred call;
O swift and shadowy, turn away, take flight,
Let the stones lie unused, forget the wall.
Walls may be strong, but there is strength can fling
Their stone like leaves in a wind's thundering.
O swift and hard, despair of speed and height,
Pull down the granite shadow ere it enfold
This dust so terrible with light:
There is a doom of gods within its gold!

The swift gods build -- they have not known
Or feared this flake of dust too bright for stone.
Still with their hardness they encompass him,
Still now with haste and noise,
With skill that blights, with order that destroys,
They lift a granite shadow, high and grim.

V

Now must the lover heed at last the wall,
Now must he heed the gods that build,
Seeing beneath the stones the dreams killed,
Seeing of his own dreams what may befall.
The shadow of the wall is on his dream,
And the dream breaks, and looking out and down,
The lover sees the granite town;
Sheer, with jeweled window gleam,
Distorted towers earthward run
To where the millions swirl and stream
In a slit of sun;
Clearly now he sees it hang
And through the sheath of glass
Hears its shadowy hum and clang
And knows the meaning that it has.
He who saw Venus born,
And made dance and made prayer,
Carving life, molding life,
Calling life not there --
Looks out on walls, walls,
Looks down on men blown
Darkly, like drenched sand,
Dreamless, through grooved stone.

VI

Slowly upon the surge that sweeps a floor
Under cliff-faces thousand-squared with glass,
A bubble on the flood that licks their mass
And fills the roofless caverns with its roar,
Outward the lover passes, mute and small,
Near the gods' feet, and underneath their call.
They have not seen him go, but if they saw
Would they not fear withdrawal of a sun,
Noons dimmed to pearl, spring frozen in its thaw,
Green turned to blue and silver, scarlet dun?
Would they not fear lest shafts that gleam
Should yet be husks gone cold,
And speaking pavements where the stream
Of men runs strong, be bare,
And iron wheels lie red and old
In streets where silence is and mold,
But moving things nowhere?
The lover passes out and on,
Fades from the roaring clefts, is gone;
But the gods have not feared his going,
The gods move still, still call, unknowing.
Still black and full, the stream beneath
Threshes in its stony sheath.
Only the lover, only the lover
Knows that life will soon be gone;
He whom the gods could not discover,
He who passes on,
He has known gods before,
He has seen gods fall,
He has seen empty floor,
Empty shrine, empty hall,
He has heard stone roar
From a crumbling wall.





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