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FAITH, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sound, sound forever, ye clarions of thought
Last Line: Monologue later used by joyce in ulysses.
Variant Title(s): The Trumpets Of The Mind
Subject(s): Bible; Faith; Prayer; Prophecy & Prophets; Religion; Belief; Creed; Theology


Sound, sound forever, ye clarions of thought.
When, face uplifted, to the Lord, he marched—
Joshua the dreamer, roused in his wrath,
The prophet with his hosts—about the walls
The trumpet sound re-echoed. Then the king,
As first they marched around, in scorn loud laughed;
Their second turn, still laughing, had it cried:
"Thinkst thou to overturn the town with wind?"
The third time round they drew the sacred ark
Before. The blaring trumpets led the march
Round walls from which the playing children looked
And spat upon the ark, their treble shouts
Or their toy horns mocking the trumpet peal.
At the fourth turn, scorning old Aaron's sons,
Behind the parapets laid deep with dust
The women worked at distaff and at wheel,
And in their jests the Hebrew host reviled,
And threw stones at the trumpet sound. Again,
A fifth time, round they marched. The battlements
Were crowded with the blind and with the drunk,
Whose riotous hootings beat against the walls
And rose to mock the trumpets in the clouds.
At the sixth turn the king uprose again
Upon his tower, his tower of granite piled,
So high an eagle built upon its top,
So hard the lightnings dashed their bolts in vain—
The king uprose, with mirth beyond control
And cried: "What good musicians are these Jews!"
About the smiling king laughed all the men,
The patriarchs, from council chamber risen.
And at the seventh turn the ramparts fell.

Théodore Faullin de Banville (1823-1891) published at eighteen a
volume of verse that marked him as a follower of Gautier. He combined a romantic
enthusiasm with the Parnassian concern for form; much of his work is rendered
shallow by this growing preoccupation with treatment. Nonetheless, de Banville
was hailed by Hugo, and won many imitators, especially in his observation of
external beauty.
From the first line of his poem The Laurels Are Felled the novelist
Dujardin took the title of his book, which employs the device of interior
monologue later used by Joyce in Ulysses.





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