Time Past

Time past makes all things new, time that makes new things old:
time which men grimly hate, and call him murderer, cheat—
devouring time of poets, time that lines beauty's brow
and covers beauty's hair with the dust of his feet;
death's elder brother time, that quietly makes death
forgotten, death's long generations all forgot
by later sons of death. Silent time take them all:
silent, ironic, the all-comprehending lot.
Unmoralising time makes all things old—these flowers
that fling their yellow beauty to the unborn spring
like new creation knowing themselves fair and good
wilt soon be lost; all colour that the seasons bring,
the seasons too, time-lost and time-abandoned. We
too, we poised on our ocean rock above the tide
unknowing what marvels drown in the bitter depths
million-fat homed, we know ourselves but as a guide
and mark for reason: lightless time takes that light too.
Time makes all new things old, covering them with sand
or his great flood of waters; and so these mournful words.
But time makes old things new, equally new, his hand
stirs, and the sands dissolve, the flood parts, or the tide
sinks unimaginably. I have gone and seen
pale hammered gold, the circlet of Chaldean Ur
its princess wore, a dagger bronzen green (time's green)
and the crushed skulls of famous soldiers dead with her.
I have seen her chariot, and that blue shrine inwrought
with lapis-lazuli; these things remorseless time
took and has now restored. Astonishing time has brought
hither the mastodon ice-bound in bones and flesh.
Time past renews its cycles; the impermanent hills
fade and are built anew; fire fades and springs anew.
To-morrow I shall see anew that flower the new time wills.

—J.C.B.