Calm as a long-forgotten marble god who smiles,
Colossal, in the grim serenity of stone,
Upon the broken pillars lying all alone
Athwart the horizon's infinite and yellow miles;

Whom neither desert darkness nor the desert noon,
Nor dawns that render terrible the bare dead land;
Nor winds that wrap his mighty form in palls of sand,
Nor the Medusa of the dumb and stony moon,

Shall evermore dismay, nor lion, nor the lynx
With silken-sheathèd claws and eyes of golden glede;
Nor any griffin, from the gates of treasure freed
To roam the gulfs, nor any wild and wandering sphinx:—

Even thus, amid the waste of all fair things that were,
Of high marmoreal dreams immense and overthrown,
I wait forever, and about my face is blown
The sand of crumbling cenotaph and sepulcher.