European Twilight

As ONE looks at the world in the effort to understand it
There are various things to see that are all too clear:
The scoundrel and bandit striving to command it
Now and here,

The self-deceived, self-important, and self-seeking,
Jockeying for position, for money, or for power,
And the self-denying, who should speak out, not speaking
In such an hour.

This much appears. It is written in every mind,
Whatever we thought or hoped, nor can be denied;
Whatever we thought or hoped has been left behind
And set aside.

Europe that gave us the fire, that lightened and led,
Feels flame she loosed through the whole world wither and scorch.
She lighted, “ignoring the heart and trusting the head,”
That other torch

That burns the world down into volcanic ash,
Pompeian, lifeless, of all meaning stripped.
Are we apt to find in the rubble and lava trash
Some manuscript?

How should such thought survive, base, economic,
Double-talk commonplace? Once science shone.
But the new ideologies, immoral or comic,
Will perish alone.

“No faith was born in Europe — only warring churches”
And stately cathedrals constructed to contain
The uncontainable, for which Europe searches
Always in vain.

Perhaps it is her glory to be searching.
“She has lost the Virgin. She never found the Lamb,”
Which lends some point to the tired demon perching
On Notre Dame.

Men knew long since that the world stands only by changing.
Only by changing always can it stay
In the strict ellipse of the shifting orbit ranging
Whither none can say.

Toward some great center of galactic fire?
Or starproof dark where emptiness stands still?
We have our share of insolence who inquire,
We who thought ill.

We are like a man who has done a thing concealed,
But shameful, he cannot speak of, cannot forget,
Whose terror is not that his sin might be revealed
But of doing worse yet.

And therefore he strives and suffers, grieved and alone,
With that in his spirit he never can forgive,
Knowing he must find some better direction unknown,
If he is to live.

That is the world, that man with the ache in his heart
Which is not reasoned away by the voluble brain.
But the new line on which he is to depart
Is not yet plain.

The old is over before the new is clear.
Good night, Europe! Never did sunset flame
Give promise less splendid. The night is upon us like fear,
Like grief, like shame.

Nor have we done what we could to diminish the weight
Of terror, we who pass lightly on what your men
Did in their fear and ignorance and hate
And will again.

Anything to us was better than getting involved
With the world’s sorrow, which, of course, was not our affair.
We could live on our fat, though the universe dissolved
In grief and despair.

America, blind as Europe, with a different blindness,
The sun has set. When the time comes to ensue
Justice and mercy and perpetual kindness,
What will you do?