EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY

Once in Persia reigned a king,
Who upon a signet ring
Carved a maxim strange and wise,
When held before his eyes,
Gave him counsel at a glance,
Fit for every change and chance:
Solemn words, and these were they:
'EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Trains, of camel through the sand
Brought him gems from Samarcand;
Fleets of galleys over the seas
Brought him pearls to rival these,
But he counted little gain,
Treasures of the mine or main;
'What is wealth?' the king would say
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

'Mid the pleasures of his court
At the zenith of their sport,
When the palms of all his guests
Burned with clapping at his jests,
Seated midst the figs and wine,
Said the king: 'Ah, friends of mine,'
Pleasure comes but not to stay,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Woman, fairest ever seen
Was the bride he crowned as queen,
Pillowed on the marriage-bed
Whispering to his soul, he said
"Though no monarch ever pressed
Fairer bosom to his breast,
Mortal flesh is only clay!
'EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Fighting on the furious field,
Once a javelin pierced his shield,
Soldiers with a loud lament
Bore him bleeding to his tortured side,
'Pain is hard to bear," he cried,
But with patience, day by day,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY.'

Towering in a public square
Forty cubits in the air,
And the king disguised, unknown,
Gazed upon his sculptured name,
And he pondered, "What is fame?'
Fame is but a slow decay!
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Struck with palsy, sore and old,
Waiting at the gates of gold,
Said he with his dying breath
'Life is done, but what is Death?"
Then as answer to the king
Fell a sunbeam on his ring;
Showing by a heavenly ray,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Theodore Tilten

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats