Momus Analysis

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 sprayAgainst 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 foreverwishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all theiron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, goneinto dreams, by God.I wonder, Momus,

Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and lookwith deep laughter

On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,solemn repetitions of history.A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers fromyour 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 andwomen

Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,the salt of tears,

And blood drops of undiminishing war.

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