O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings -- With those who shaped him to the thing he is -- When this dumb Terror shall reply to God, After the silence of the centuries? Exordium. [George Cabot Lodge] Speak! said my soul, be stern and adequate; The sunset falls from Heaven, the year is late, Love waits with fallen tresses at thy gate And mourns for perished days. Speak! in the rigor of thy fate and mine, Ere these scant, dying days, bright-lipped with wine, All one by one depart, resigned, divine, Through desert, autumn ways. Speak! thou art lonely in thy chilly mind, With all this desperate solitude of wind, The solitude of tears that make thee blind, Of wild and causeless tears. Speak! thou hast need of me, heart, hand and head, Speak, if it be an echo of thy dread, A dirge of hope, of young illusions dead -- Perchance God hears! The Frozen Grail. [Elsa Barker] (To Peary and his men, before the last expedition) Why sing the legends of the Holy Grail, The dead crusaders of the Sepulchre, While these men live? Are the great bards all dumb? Here is a vision to shake the blood of Song, And make Fame's watchman tremble at his post.