BALLYLESSON, NEAR BELFAST <br />Whoever is able will pursue the plainly <br />False immortality of not having lived in vain but leaving some <br />mark in the world. <br />Secretly mocking at his own insanity <br />He labors the same, he knows that no dead man's lip was ever <br />curled in self-scorn, <br />And immortality is for the dead. <br />Jesus and Caesar out of the bricks of man's weakness, Washington <br />out of the brittle <br />Bones of man's strength built their memorials, <br />This nameless chief of a knot of forgotten tribes in the Irish darkness <br />used faithfuller <br />Simpler materials: to diadem a hilltop <br />That sees the long loughs and the Mourne Mountains, with a ring <br />of enormous embankment, and to build <br />In the center that great toad of a dolmen <br />Piled up of ponderous basalt that sheds the centuries like raindrops. <br />He drove the labor, <br />And has earmarked already some four millenniums. <br />His very presence is here, thick-bodied and brutish, a brutal and <br />senseless will-power. <br />Immortality? While Homer and Shakespeare are names, <br />Not of men but verses, and the elder has not lived nor the <br />younger will not, such treadings of time. <br />Conclude that secular like Christian immortality's <br />Too cheap a bargain: the name, the work or the soul: glass beads <br />are the trade for savages.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-giant-s-ring/
