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The Destruction
of Cathedrals - Daisy Aldan
For there, like France at war, I found myself,
Not standing forth in pride and glory, but on my knees in mourning,
amid ruins.
Amid the noise of falling glass and plaster.
Statues, pinnacles, bell turrets, counterforts; crockets, birds,
pillars and arches,
All all in ruins incalcinated.
Cross, candlesticks, reliquaries, masonry, swept away like wisps
of straw.
The smiling angel has only half a face,
The Chimera which climbs t meet her has been struck by a bullet
in her back,
The hands of the caryatid, amputated,
Solomons cloak is cracked the Queen of Sheba has lost her robe
and crown.
The flames have scaled the steeples spread over the roofs
O vos omnes qui transites perviam, attendete et vedete
Everywhere they are
licking the lead plates
Disclosing the bare frame forest across interlacing balconies
Like a prodigious skeleton of fire
Leaving an immense void twisted iron, indented clock wheels, broken
muted bells,
Foolish imposter doors which did not open
Hang in high galleries. Perforated the great roses intense blues,
purples,
Reds so warm and vigorous which burnished
The rays of the midday sun. The gargoyles drip heavy tears. I hear
the bells falling.
Wind is raging among the naves and corpses.
Sonnet 64 - William Shakespeare
When I have seen by time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers
I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage,
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the
kingdom of the shore,
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath
taught me thus to ruminate,
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But
weep to have that which it fears to lose.
The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats
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?
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