# Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/Lines by Arno

LINES BY ARNO.
To-night this shell my soul long cast away Unechoing from the chantings of the sea, Rang once again sonorous with the beat Of the eternal breakers, resonant And shaken with the unintermittent surf Of sound that did usurp its every niche. Its porcelain chamber held the Atlantic main, And all the pulses of the eternal heart Opening a way into this fragile brain, Trembling in mortal veins, found tabernacle For the revolted betterness of God, His ancient pities and august desires, Within the narrow tenement of self Whose walls expanding to the insurgent flow Revealed the unexploited depths within.
This night the mood was on me, caught from prayer And silent pacing by the Arno's bridges, Notings of trudgers home, and knots of men Boisterous in the wine-shops, beggars, children, And lovers pausing in the gloom of columns, And awed perusal of the other world's Foothold in this,—the bell-tower, incandescent, Moving upon the horizon as I moved, Beside the dome's star-blotting canopy, And many a sleeping tower and pinnacle Impassive o'er the dark roofs and the lights, And the six bridges whose deep-shadowed spans Stir premonitions of obscurer worlds That lie beneath the piers of this we tread;
This night the mood was on me and I knew The ruth and pity of a million years, Entered the shadows of forgotten times, Tasted the powers of the age to come; Saw all the temples, all the spires and domes, Saw all the forums, and triumphal arches, ​The aqueducts, the theatres, the quais, Of all the peoples and of all the times, Rise on the sky in broken silhouette Of ruin, or in pride of living use: The diverse stages of a thousand clans Of this and other times; some, hives remote And local whose forgotten murmur rose In wars obscure and civic jubilation Some several centuries and died away, Bequeathing brooding pillars to the silence That so succeeded; some, imperial lands Whose strayers probed the gulfs of distant seas, Whose legions woke the echoes of far isles, And whose excitement in the blaze of day Preoccupied the planet for an age, Bridging oblivion with projected thought And rolling back the muffling floods of death With scaling dreams and song of stellar span, Whose tumult in the silence of the sky, Whose order in the gardens of the sun No less was gulfed in peace, to leave its stones Gouged with the indecipherable runes Wherewith man passing all unwittingly Lays his Hand on the eternal. And I saw Besides these, occupying earth's horizons The towers around which teem in myriads The living, in far corners of the earth Or here at hand, standing like lighthouses Above the generations as they surge,— The stages of the peoples, streets and fields, Bastions and fortresses and masonries, Whereto acceding from the mysterious ports Of birth, uncounted souls take up their place, Appropriating there with tower and spire The attachments of their forebears, and their faiths, To love and hate, traffic and fight and die, Ruled by the ascendency of heritage In their small cosmos, and from birth to death ​Without a glance turned on the aghast abyss Of thought, nor ever hearkening To the appalling roaring of the waters Risen in flood beneath the piers of day.
The ruth and pity of a million years Spoke in my heart. I knew the voice was God Articulate in the handiwork of man Refined by time, whereby the Duomo globe, The Giotto apparition, and the spears Of thought that rose around me, seemed to rise Out of the heart's core of humanity Anonymously speaking from the dead, Creative in its travail and divine And bearing witness to its ground in God. The myriads groping through the restricted course Of their swift days, and each one baited on Each in his place by life's sufficient lures To lift the load of days and in hot blood To meet the knives of life insensible Through passion, found about these stones That lie to-day in ruins, those same faiths And loyalties which won their hearts to toil, To strife, and so to life. Unconsciously Building according to their thirst for life They gave to God Himself a voice in clay Which still speaks to us though the builders sleep.
No less the eternal spirit lures us on Through baits commensurate with our little souls, Objects but little nobler than the fees And guerdons of the battle-games of old, Yet 'round which that within the heart of man Which is divine casts glamour not of earth, To self-creation in the toils of action And to the praise of God in self-abandon. From our unconscious deed when we are gone And others like us for a thousand years, ​Doubt not that there shall rest aloft in time A coral structure from our minute lives Which towering ever as our seas subside And sanctified by thought shall tell the races Of other epochs that our submerged days And straitened thought through prayer and toil and blood Yet drew on God Who working o’er our heads Transmuted imperfection into art And built up glory from relinquished dreams And made of clay memorial to stilled prayer, Giving our silted graves power in the light, Our dusted mouths voice in the upper air.
Yet every building shall be razed, nor shall There rest one stone upon another placed By our primeval days, for in the time Of consummation such communities Of worship, and such habitations Shall rise, that all our most ethereal spires, Our flame-transmuted monuments shall seem But lead to gold or clay to alabaster; Then shall tinged cities rise whose contours sweep Harmonious with the lineaments of heaven, Proportionate to nature, and of hues That melt into the suffused tints of dawn, Wherein a holier race shall walk in peace, Sharers, by faith acquired through our stress, In treasuries of splendour past our guess, In whose deep hearts our pain and joy shall live, As in their airiest temples, their sublimest towers There shall rest token of our humbler shafts In line and curve inbuilt into their art, Our hope and aim ingrown into their faiths.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.