by
Poet's Day

See How Our Works Endure!

See How Our Works Endure!
by
Poet's Day

This week’s poem, chosen at short notice, is “Cities and Thrones and Powers” by Rudyard Kipling.

That in our very death,
     And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
     “See how our works endure!”

Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936)

Poem 341. Cities and Thrones and Powers

Cities and Thrones and Powers
     Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
     Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
     To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
     The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
     She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill,
     Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,
     And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance
     To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind
     To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
     As bold as she:
That in our very death,
     And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
     “See how our works endure!”

This poem is rather like Shelley’s Ozymandias, commenting on the arrogance of men who believe that they have made a lasting mark on the world though their anonymity is ultimately assured.

The first stanza likens great cities, rulers and influential persons to flowers: although individuals live and die, others rise to take their place just as the new blossom appears in spring to our delight.

The second stanza suggests that we are like the daffodil who never knows what chance put paid to the previous season’s flowers but with the small arrogance that comes from ignorance, fancies its week-long existence to be eternal.

The final stanza emphasises this metaphor: we are as blind and bold as the daffodil and with equally little reason: even as we die and are buried, we consider our posterity with epitaphs and tombstones.

I like it because it comments on our blindness to the workings of fate and strongly suggests that any wilful act to ensure our posterity is probably doomed.

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