THE GOD-MAKER, MAN
By Don Marquis
Fallen mute
Are the strings of Apollo,
His lyre and his lute;
And the lips of the Memnons are mute
Evermore;
And the gods of the North,— are they dead or forgetful,
Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?
Are they drunk, or grown weary of worship and fretful,
Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?
And into what night have the Orient dieties strayed?
Swart gods of the Nile, in dusk splendors arrayed,
Brooding Isis and somber Osiris,
You were gone ere the fragile papyrus,
( That bragged you eternal! ) decayed.
The avatars
But illumine their limited evens
And vanish like plunging stars;
They are fixed in the whirling heavens
No firmer than falling stars;
Brief lords of the changing soul, they pass
Like a breath from the face of a glass,
Or a blossom of summer blown shallop-like over
The clover
And tossed tides of grass.
Sink to silence the psalms and the paeans
The shibboleths shift, and the faiths,
And the temples that challenged the aeons
Are tenanted only by wraiths;
Swoon to silence the cymbals and psalters,
The worships grow senseless and strange,
And the mockers ask, “Where be thy altars?”
Crying, “Nothing is changeless — but Change!”
Yes, nothing seems changeless, but Change.
And yet, through the creed-wrecking years,
One story for ever appears;
The tale of a City Supernal —
The whisper of Something eternal —
A passion, a hope, and a vision
That peoples the silence with Powers;
A fable of meadows Elysian
Where Time enters not with his Hours;—
Manifold are the tale's variations,
Race and clime ever tinting the dreams,
Yet its essence, through endless mutations,
Immutable gleams.
Deathless, though godheads be dying,
Surviving the creeds that expire,
Illogical, reason-defying,
Lives that passionate, primal desire;
Insistent, persistent, forever
Man cries to the silences, Never
Shall Death reign the lord of the soul,
Shall the dust be the ultimate goal —
I will storm the black bastions of Night!
I will tread where my vision has trod,
I will set in the darkness a light,
In the vastness, a god!”