text: Momus is the name men give your face,
  The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
  Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
  Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray Against horizons purple, silent.
  
  Yes, Momus,
  Men have flung your face in bronze
  To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
  They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
  Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
  All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
  Thrown over and through with a smile that forever wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone into dreams, by God.
  
  I wonder, Momus,
  Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look with deep laughter
  On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history.
  A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from your kindliness of bronze,
  You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent;
  Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
  Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and women
  Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil, the salt of tears,
  And blood drops of undiminishing war.