Wilyem Clark
12-30-2015, 11:23 AM
Despair, fellow moderns!
Our culture grows thin and dopey and feeble,
Without lasting beauty, without lustrous rapture.
Its humanist prop-beams have rotted in place;
Its coats of discernment peel away; nor can it retain
Any depth of meaning to keep it anchored.
The waters that power its mill wheels are sluggish,
Except for those trends that in spates undercut
The better embankments; they leave behind
A featureless flat—all silt and slime.
Ages of thought are ignored and discarded,
And dull grains of trivia fill the new voids;
On such insubstantial, unstable foundations
No well-wrought temple to Art can survive.
Frivolities garner accolades
As serious matters are mocked and dumped,
And glorious diamonds of bygone masters
Are strewn on quicksand and sink beyond sight.
Replacements of value are hard to come by—
Traditional mindsets, now choked with debris,
Cannot be cleaned out using blunted extractors,
And reliable tools will not be forthcoming . . .
Our mental forge-fires are sputtering out.
Our culture grows thin and dopey and feeble,
Without lasting beauty, without lustrous rapture.
Its humanist prop-beams have rotted in place;
Its coats of discernment peel away; nor can it retain
Any depth of meaning to keep it anchored.
The waters that power its mill wheels are sluggish,
Except for those trends that in spates undercut
The better embankments; they leave behind
A featureless flat—all silt and slime.
Ages of thought are ignored and discarded,
And dull grains of trivia fill the new voids;
On such insubstantial, unstable foundations
No well-wrought temple to Art can survive.
Frivolities garner accolades
As serious matters are mocked and dumped,
And glorious diamonds of bygone masters
Are strewn on quicksand and sink beyond sight.
Replacements of value are hard to come by—
Traditional mindsets, now choked with debris,
Cannot be cleaned out using blunted extractors,
And reliable tools will not be forthcoming . . .
Our mental forge-fires are sputtering out.