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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Road Menders
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How solitary gleams the lamplit street
 Waiting the far--off morn!
 How softly from the unresting city blows
 The murmur borne
 Down this deserted way!
 Dim loiterers pass home with stealthy feet.
 Now only, sudden at their interval,
 The lofty chimes awaken and let fall
 Deep thrills of ordered sound;
 Subsiding echoes gradually drowned
 In a great stillness, that creeps up around,
 And darkly grows
 Profounder over all
 Like a strong frost, hushing a stormy day.

 But who is this, that by the brazier red
 Encamped in his rude hut,
 With many a sack about his shoulder spread
 Watches with eyes unshut?
 The burning brazier flushes his old face,
 Illumining the old thoughts in his eyes.
 Surely the Night doth to her secrecies
 Admit him, and the watching stars attune
 To their high patience, who so lightly seems
 To bear the weight of many thousand dreams
 (Dark hosts around him sleeping numberless);
 He surely hath unbuilt all walls of thought
 To reach an air--wide wisdom, past access
 Of us, who labour in the noisy noon,
 The noon that knows him not.

 For lo, at last the gloom slowly retreats,
 And swiftly, like an army, comes the Day,
 All bright and loud through the awakened streets
 Sending a cheerful hum.
 And he has stolen away.
 Now, with the morning shining round them, come
 Young men, and strip their coats
 And loose the shirts about their throats,
 And lightly up their ponderous hammers lift,
 Each in his turn descending swift
 With triple strokes that answer and begin
 Duly, and quiver in repeated change,
 Marrying the eager echoes that weave in
 A music clear and strange.
 But pausing soon, each lays his hammer down
 And deeply breathing bares
 His chest, stalwart and brown,
 To the sunny airs.
 Laughing one to another, limber hand
 On limber hip, flushed in a group they stand,
 And now untired renew their ringing toil.

 The sun stands high, and ever a fresh throng
 Comes murmuring; but that eddying turmoil
 Leaves many a loiterer, prosperous or unfed,
 On easy or unhappy ways
 At idle gaze,
 Charmed in the sunshine and the rhythm enthralling,
 As of unwearied Fates, for ever young,
 That on the anvil of necessity
 From measureless desire and quivering fear,
 With musical sure lifting and downfalling
 Of arm and hammer driven perpetually,
 Beat out in obscure span
 The fiery destiny of man.
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