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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
CHORUS FOR THE TRAGEDY OF MAN, 2000 A.D., by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER Poet's Biography First Line: There is no earth left now Last Line: And is, forever and forevermore! | |||
THERE is no earth left now, But toppling heaps of debris, Shattered scaffoldings, and gaping chasms In which the poisonous air Hangs close, and puts out the explorer's lamp: Vast cities tenantless, Huge, foul with soot and dust, And rotting into ruin; Labyrinths of rusty rails, Innumerable shelves of books mildewed, Colossal cranes that stretch out stiff, dead arms. For a curse on man has fallen: The black plague-lust of tragedy Has crushed to pulp his soul. The past is all completed, The future is accomplished; There is no future now. Here and there in the bare, brown waste Rise quivering chimneys of tin Vomiting yellow smoke: Filling the air with a filthy soup of fog, Sour, nauseating, dead: While seen through this horrible haze Are black squat bulks of iron Clanking and howling with machinery: Screeching, quivering, gaping, tottering huts, Lunatic asylums of greed, lethal chambers of joy, The last fantastic hope and help of man. For these the spinning nebulae grew still; For these layer on layer the earth was built Of flowers and lives innumerable; For these the will through countless centuries Accumulating force, Burst forth into explosions of desire. These are the final pinnacles accomplished Of that cathedral pile of misery Which we have raised to God through days and nights: For them my pencil moves, All things in them are done. There is no future now. Long ago, first we heard That all things which are, are vain: And yet that which is, is right. Man heeded not, nor was made To bow thus his head before fate, But to struggle with it and to fall; And to bring down with him at the last Chance and the wandering stars: The present that mocks our desires, And the future that builds them anew. Now the air is utterly dead: Tatters of smoke through which rain, Rheumy-eyed, jerks her swift needle To hide from men's eyes the bare sun: Only here and there goes plunging, Racing, with roaring vibration, A steel thing with monstrous engines Winged, like a glittering bird. It charges across the vision From the night into the night. Nor is there ocean left: Its waters are viscid and foul With the innumerable pollutions Which the rivers roll into them. Like to stale treacle or jam, It lies now, sluggish and grey, Feebly whipped by propellers, Slowly furrowed by keels, Bearing many a blistered wreck of iron, Paved with countless forgotten graves. Not in the past, but now The curse upon man has fallen: The black plague-lust of tragedy Has crushed to pulp his soul. The past is all completed, The future is accomplished: There is no future now. O endless generations gone before And long forgotten, come, vast hordes of ghosts! See, the iron curtain, rusted in its groove, Creaks slowly down upon the darkening scene: Man has destroyed his mother, Life: all things He slew to deepen the horror of his doom. For he was neither body nor soul, though now His soul has slain all bodies as decreed. Do you as I do now, applaud this end: Speak, ages, for your effort comes to this! Acclaim unflinching progress to this goal Inevitable, and marked out from the first: So and not otherwise it must, should be, And is, forever and forevermore! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ARIZONA POEMS: 4. THE WINDMILLS by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER ARIZONA POEMS: 6. RAIN IN THE DESERT by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 1. EMBARKATION by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 2. HEAT by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 3. FULL MOON by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 4. THE MOON'S ORCHESTRA by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 5. THE STEVEDORES by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 6. NIGHT LANDING by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI: 7. THE SILENCE by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER GREEN SYMPHONY by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER |
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