I met a traveller from a modern land,

who spoke of something vast and levelled flat,

a place where all was measured, marked, and made,

a chartered street, a chartered river bound,

where mind-forged manacles lay thick as stone,

and every surface bore the same intent,

no king remained, no pedestal, no face,

only the works repeated without end,

each like the last, denying time itself,

a heap of broken images without shade,

fragments shored against imagined ruin,

their colours fixed against the failing light,

and on them words remained though all else failed,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair,

and close beside, in careful, certain script,

Exegi monumentum aere perennius,¹

and further still, as though to answer both,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this,

and cut between, though worn by time and hand,

Ring out the old, ring in the new, was writ,

and near to it, less whole, less certain cut,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind,

and underneath, less clean, more bitter cut,

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,²

the voices gathered, promising that what was made

would master what was made, that stone or word

or nation might endure beyond the years,

but nothing living answered any claim,

no breath, no voice, no hand to speak it back,

only the works remained, and they were wrong,

but nothing answered, nothing altered course,

what will survive of us is love, they said,

and still the same hard forms endured unchanged,

only a world made hard against itself,

and all their monuments pressed into it.

¹ Latin for ‘I have built a monument more lasting

than bronze.’

² Latin for ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.’

Image: Nicole Lau