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You have built a world of paper and wood,
Culture and cult and lies;
Has the cobra altered beneath his hood,
Or the fire in the tigers' eyes?
You have turned from valley and hill and flood,
You have set yourselves apart,
Forgetting the earth that feeds the blood
And the talon that finds the heart.
You boast you have stilled the lustful call
Of the black ancestral ape,
But life, the tigress that bore you all,
Has never changed her shape.
And a strange shape comes to your faery mead,
With a fixed black simian frown,
But you will not know and you will not heed,
Till your towers come tumbling down.
-Robert E. Howard
Or the fire in the tigers' eyes?
You have turned from valley and hill and flood,
You have set yourselves apart,
Forgetting the earth that feeds the blood
And the talon that finds the heart.
You boast you have stilled the lustful call
Of the black ancestral ape,
But life, the tigress that bore you all,
Has never changed her shape.
And a strange shape comes to your faery mead,
With a fixed black simian frown,
But you will not know and you will not heed,
Till your towers come tumbling down.
-Robert E. Howard
When reading this poem, I picture a repetition of "Til your towers come tumbling down." Almost as if an echo, while the words, lines, and structure gradually crumble and collapse to just a pile of alphabetic rubble. The poem,in this way seems to illustrate, in microcosm, aspects of civilization that have had no significant beneficial value to life and its continuation. When we build with the earth, when we think like the earth, when we feel the earth, and when we see from the perspective of the earth, we will become wiser in our civility.
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