Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat: Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up And rhythms of change within the heart begun By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters; Pylons and monoliths went on by ages, Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about; Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex; Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdom Standing on Carthage must get nearer still; While in Chaldea an altitude of god Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed Upon a mountain stirring a surmise Of floods and alterations of the sea, A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaar Temple and escape to god the ascertained. These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth, Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows And memories of man's earliest theme of towers. Space--the old source of time--should be undone, Eternity defined, by men who trusted Another tier would equal them with god. A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations, Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder That glowed upon their under sides by night And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil. Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remained In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves; While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers Knelt on a flank to clip its sweaty coat. A builder leans across the last wide courses; His unadjustable unreaching eyes Fail under him before his glances sink On the clouds' upper layers of sooty curls Where some long lightning goes like swallows downward, But at the wider gallery next below Recognise master-masons with pricked parchments: That builder then, as one who condescends Unto the sea and all that is beneath him, His hairy breast on the wet mortar, calls 'How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!' On the next eminence the orgulous king Nimroud stands up conceiving he shall live To conquer god, now that he knows where god is: His eager hands push up the tower in thought ... Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides down Among the carpenters because he has seen One shape an eagle-woman on a door-post: He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted day.