Calm as a long-forgotten marble god who smiles,

Colossal, in the grim serenity of stone,

Upon the broken pillars lying all alone,

Athwart the horizon’s infinite and yellow miles;

Whom neither desert darkness nor the desert noon,

Nor dawns that render terrible the bare dead land,

Nor winds that wrap his mighty form in palls of sand,

Nor the Medusa of the dumb and stony moon,

Shall evermore dismay, nor lion, nor the lynx,

With silken-sheathÈd claws, and eyes of golden glede;

Nor any griffin, from the gates of treasure freed

To roam the gulf, nor any wild and wandering sphinx:—

Even thus, amid the waste of all fair things that were,

Of high marmoreal dreams immense and overthrown,

I wait forever, and about my face is blown

The sand of crumbling cenotaph and sepulcher.