The Statue

Short, husky, black and brown with dust and sweat The quarry men, whose bar and sledge have pried The marble loose, stand back to watch it drawn Down the rough skidroad from the mountainside,

Out of its first exposure, heading toward A new erosion, where a mind, an eye, And something called imagination, wait To wear it down, before the hands dare try

To grasp and lift the chisel and the maul, One man's complete employment now, — observe How stone is dressed in nakedness, how steel With sharp straight edge brings out the bevelled curve.

One man does this, who stops at times, and frowns, Or hums himself a little tune that goes, When all goes well, The more the marble wastes, The more it wastes, the more the statue grows.

Finished, at last (he thinks) and sold, and set In some appropriate spot, a colonnade Or Syracusan grove, where oranges Are balls of sun among the globes of shade.

Here, like its owner's fortune, just a trace Too new for dignity, the statue stands, Almost a masterpiece, requiring still Some final touch, the work of other hands.

And these are given; wind and rain and sun, Time and the weather, infinitely slow, Patient through generations, waste and wear, Correct the marble, make the figure grow,

So that tradition, anciency, and grace Are added by subtraction, and the pure Symbol from image forms, along whose base Runs the new rune—See how our works endure.

Endure, disintegrate, and, even beyond Disintegration, live in long renown: After the vandals come, lop off the limbs, Hack at the head and helmet, topple down

The mutilated torso, drag it off Aboard a ship, to cast it in the seas, Granted its last perfection, men recall Its glory in one word — Praxiteles.