Past Perfect: Beneath the Flooding Darkness

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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.

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You, Andrew Marvell

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 …