  How shall we honor them, our Deathless Dead? With strew of laurel and the stately tread? With blaze of banners brightening overhead? Nay, not alone these cheaper praises bring: They will not have this easy honoring. Not all our cannon, breaking the blue noon, Not the rare reliquary, writ with rune, Not all the iterance of our reverent cheers, Not all sad bugles blown, Can honor them grown saintlier with the years. Nor can we praise alone In the majestic reticence of stone: Not even our lyric tears Can honor them, passed upward to their spheres. Nay, we must meet our august hour of fate As they met theirs; and this will consecrate, This honor them, this stir their souls afar, Where they are climbing to an ampler star. The flaring pageant and the storied pile May parley with Oblivion awhile, To save some Sargon of the fading host; But these are vain to hold Against the slow creep of the patient mold, The noiseless drill of the erasing rust: The pomp, the arch, the scroll cannot beguile The ever-circling Destinies that must Mix king and clown into one rabble dust. No name of mortal is secure in stone: Hewn on the Parthenon, the name will waste; Carved on the Pyramid, ‘twill be effaced. In the heroic deed and there alone, Is man’s one hold against the craft of Time, That humbles into dust the shaft sublime— That mixes sculptured Karnak with the sands, unannealed, blown about the Libyan lands. And for the high, heroic deeds of men, Only the heart-quick praise, the praise of deed, Is faithful praise for the heroic breed. How shall we honor them, our Deathless Dead? How keep their mighty memories alive? In him who feels their passion, they survive! Flatter their souls with deed, and all is said! In the heroic soul their souls create Is raised remembrance past the reach of fate. The will to serve and bear, The will to love and dare, And take for God unprofitable risk— These things, these things will utter praise and pÆan Louder than lyric thunders Æschylean; These things will build our dead unwasting obelisk.
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