Babel: The Gate Of The God

Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props     Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits     Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power     Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat:     Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up     And rhythms of change within the heart begun     By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters;     Pylons and monoliths went on by ages,     Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about;     Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid     That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing     Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex;     Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdom     Standing on Carthage must get nearer still;     While in Chaldea an altitude of god     Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed     Upon a mountain stirring a surmise     Of floods and alterations of the sea,     A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaar     Temple and escape to god the ascertained.     These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth,     Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened     By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows     And memories of man's earliest theme of towers.     Space, the old source of time, should be undone,     Eternity defined, by men who trusted     Another tier would equal them with god.     A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations,     Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles     Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder     That glowed upon their under sides by night     And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil.     Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remained     In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves;     While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers     Knelt on a flank to clip its sweaty coat.     A builder leans across the last wide courses;     His unadjustable unreaching eyes     Fail under him before his glances sink     On the clouds' upper layers of sooty curls     Where some long lightning goes like swallows downward,     But at the wider gallery next below     Recognise master-masons with pricked parchments:     That builder then, as one who condescends     Unto the sea and all that is beneath him,     His hairy breast on the wet mortar, calls     'How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!'     On the next eminence the orgulous king     Nimroud stands up conceiving he shall live     To conquer god, now that he knows where god is:     His eager hands push up the tower in thought ...     Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides down     Among the carpenters because he has seen     One shape an eagle-woman on a door-post:     He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted day.     Little men hurrying, running here and there,     Within the dark and stifling walls, dissent     From every sound, and shoulder empty hods:     'The god's great altar should stand in the crypt     Among our earth's foundations', 'The god's great altar     Must be the last far coping of our work',     It should inaugurate the broad main stair',     'Or end it', 'It must stand toward the East!'     But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out     'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altar     Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?'     Then one 'It is a pedestal for deeds',     ''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow',     'It has the nature of a woman's bosom',     'The tortoise, first created, signifies it',     'A blind and rudimentary navel shows     The source of worship better than horned moons.'     Then a lean giant 'Is not a calyx needful?',     'Because round grapes on statues well expressed     Become the nadir of incense, nodal lamps,     Yet apes have hands that cut and carved red crystal',     'Birds molten, touchly talc veins bronze buds crumble     Ablid ublai ghan isz rad eighar ghaurl ...'     Words said too often seemed such ancient sounds     That men forgot them or were lost in them;     The guttural glottis-chasms of language reached,     A rhythm, a gasp, were curves of immortal thought.     Man with his bricks was building, building yet,     Where dawn and midnight mingled and woke no birds,     In the last courses, building past his knowledge     A wall that swung, for towers can have no tops,     No chord can mete the universal segment,     Earth has not basis. Yet the yielding sky,     Invincible vacancy, was there discovered,     Though piled-up bricks should pulp the sappy balks,     Weight generate a secrecy of heat,     Cankerous charring, crevices' fronds of flame.