August and laurelled have been content to speak for an age, <br />and the ages that follow <br />Respect them for that pious fidelity; <br />But you have disfeatured time for timelessness. <br />They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths to dream of, <br />rose-marble-fingered <br />Women shed light down the great lines; <br />But you have invoked the slime in the skull, <br />The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Gods like <br />racial dreams, the woman's desire, <br />The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothing <br />Human seems happy at the feet of yours. <br />Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in gray old years <br />in the evening leaning <br />Over the gray stones of the tower-top, <br />You shall be called heartless and blind; <br />And watch new time answer old thought, not a face strange <br />nor a pain astonishing; <br />But you living be laired in the rock <br />That sheds pleasure and pain like hailstones.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/soliloquy-20/
