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The Palace

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THE PALACE

 

When I was a King and a Mason,

A Master proven and skilled,

I cleared me ground for a Palace

Such as a King should build.

I decreed and dug down to my levels;

Presently, under the silt,

I came on the wreck of a Palace,

Such as a King had built.

 

There was no worth in the fashion,

There was no wit in the plan--

Hither and thither, aimless,

The ruined footing ran--

Masonry, brute, mishandled,

But carven on every stone:

"After me cometh a Builder,

Tell him. I, too, have known."

 

Swift to my use in my trenches,

Where my well planned ground-works grew,

I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars,

And cut and reset them anew.

Lime I milled of his marbles:

Burned it, slaked it, and spread,

Taking and leaving at pleasure

The gifts of the humble dead.

 

Yet I despised not nor gloried;

Yet, as we wrench them apart,

I read in the razed foundations

The heart of that builder's heart.

As he had risen and pleaded,

So did I understand

The form of the dream he had followed

In the face of the thing he had planned.

 

When I was a King and a Mason--

In the open noon of my pride,

They sent me a Word from the Darkness--

They whispered and called me aside,

They said: "The end is forbidden."

They said: "Thy use is fulfilled.

Thy Palace shall stand as that other's--

The spoil of a King who shall build."

 

I called my men from my trenches,

My quarries, my wharves and my sheers.

All I had wrought I abandoned

To the faith of the faithless years.

Only I cut on the timber--

Only I carved on the stone:

"After me cometh a Builder,

Tell him, I, too, have known."