Few modern American poets have written more eloquently about the impermanence of the human condition than Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982). A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and playwright who devoted much of his free time to politics, MacLeish was one of America’s leading public intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1960s. Over the course of his 70-year career, he wrote about everything from the rise of fascism to the legacy of western imperialism, but his favorite subject was much more universal—mankind’s mysterious passage through time and space. “To face the truth of the passing of the world and make a song of it, make beauty of it, is not to solve the riddle of our mortal lives but is to perhaps accomplish something more,” wrote MacLeish. His most famous work on the inexorable passage of time is his 1930 poem “You, Andrew Marvell.” Inspired by the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell’s famous reference to “time’s wingèd chariot” in his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” MacLeish offers a melancholy meditation on the transience of human endeavor. A man lies face down on the ground, feeling the sun move across his back. He thinks of day turning into night as the sun arcs around the globe, from east to west, leaving immense swathes of darkness in its wake. This, in turn, suggests the rise and fall of great civilizations—as Persia, Greece, Rome, and Moorish Spain all “loom and slowly disappear.” Thirty years after writing “You, Andrew Marvell,” MacLeish saw his poetic imaginings brought to life when the first orbital photos of the earth were published. “[We are all] riders of the earth,” he mused in a New York Times editorial about the photos, “brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night.”—Ed.
And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:
To feel creep up the curving east
The earthly chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change
And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass
And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on
And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown
And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls
And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across the land
Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …
