Somewhere in Space the disunited dust
That formed a visible comparted world,
Floats in unnoticed formlessness, nor mars
With stain of fleck the ethereal claritude
Of vacancy; nor with its monads driven,
Separate, irrelevant, athwart the suns,
Impedes the tangled multidudinous passage
Of rays that cross each other like the thrust
Of unrelenting swords.
The tombs that tooth
With granite mouths successive glut of Life
At last are not distinguished from the lips
Of earlier-crumbled earth. And man himself—
An evanescent peak of foam that pointed
One wave, subsided now, of matter’s tide
Leaves but bequest of stories that he took
From forms long antecedent, that were not
As he; that shall not thus combine again
In all the future sequences of1 Change.
With hope of some far-off, supernal goal,
Changeless, and independent of the years
He strove on low and shifting ways, and sent
Commissioned dreams ethereal-wing’d before,
On summits that achievement’s laggard feet
Scarcely approached, till on one lesser peak
He knew his own futility at last—
Himself an immaterial trick of Chance.