C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

“The Tropics Vanish”

From ‘Poems and Ballads’

THE TROPICS vanish, and meseems that I,

From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,

Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.

Far set in fields and woods, the town I see

Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,

Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort

Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,

New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth

Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,

And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.

There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,

Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,

My dead, the ready and the strong of word.

Their works, the salt-incrusted, still survive;

The sea bombards their founded towers; the night

Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers,

One after one, here in this grated cell,

Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,

Fell upon lasting silence. Continents

And continental oceans intervene;

A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,

Environs and confines their wandering child

In vain. The voice of generations dead

Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,

My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,

And all mutation over, stretch me down

In that denoted city of the dead.

APEMAMA.