Read the poem: “To The Past”

by James Russell Lowell

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American Literature – American Poetry – James Russell Lowell
< < < To the Memory of Hood
To W.L. Garrison > > >

To The Past

Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls,
    O kingdom of the past!
There lie the bygone ages in their palls,
    Guarded by shadows vast;
  There all is hushed and breathless,
Save when some image of old error falls
  Earth worshipped once as deathless.

There sits drear Egypt, mid beleaguering sands,
    Half woman and half beast,
The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands
    That once lit all the East;
  A dotard bleared and hoary,
There Asser crouches o’er the blackened brands
  Of Asia’s long-quenched glory.

Still as a city buried ‘neath the sea
    Thy courts and temples stand;
Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry
    Of saints and heroes grand,
  Thy phantasms grope and shiver,
Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently
  Into Time’s gnawing river.

Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun,
    Of their old godhead lorn,
Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun,
    Which they misdeem for morn;
  And yet the eternal sorrow
In their unmonarched eyes says day is done
  Without the hope of morrow.

O realm of silence and of swart eclipse,
    The shapes that haunt thy gloom
Make signs to us and move their withered lips
    Across the gulf of doom;
  Yet all their sound and motion
Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships
  On the mirage’s ocean.

And if sometimes a moaning wandereth
    From out thy desolate halls,
If some grim shadow of thy living death
    Across our sunshine falls
  And scares the world to error,
The eternal life sends forth melodious breath
  To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds
    Are silent now in dust,
Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds
    Beneath some sudden gust;
  Thy forms and creeds have vanished,
Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds
  From the world’s garden banished.

Whatever of true life there was in thee
    Leaps in our age’s veins;
Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery,
    And shake thine idle chains;—
  To thee thy dross is clinging,
For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see,
  Thy poets still are singing.

Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care,
    Float the green Fortunate Isles
Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share
    Our martyrdoms and toils;
  The present moves attended
With all of brave and excellent and fair
  That made the old time splendid.

< < < To the Memory of Hood
To W.L. Garrison > > >

American Literature – American Poetry – James Russell Lowell

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by James Russell Lowell

To The Past

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