These Songs Will Perish

These songs will perish like the shapes of air--
The singer and the songs die out forever;
But star-eyed Truth (greater than song or singer)
Sweeps hurrying on: far off she sees a gleam
Upon a peak. She cried to man of old
To build the enduring, glad Fraternal State--
Cries yet through all the ruins of the world--
Through Karnack, through the stones of Babylon--
Cries for a moment through these fading songs.

On wingèd feet, a form of fadeless youth,
She goes to meet the coming centuries,
And, hurrying, snatches up some human reed,
Blows through it once her terror-bearing note,
And breaks and throws away. It is enough
If we can be a bugle at her lips,
To scatter her contagion on mankind.