Grace Spray

Permanence By Duncan Campbell Scott?

What does this poem mean to you? What do you think he is trying to say ?

Set within a desert lone,
Circled by an arid sea,
Stands a figure carved in stone,
Where a fountain used to be.

Two abraded, pleading hands
Held below a shapeless mouth,
Human-like the fragment stands,
Tortured by perpetual drouth.

Once the form was drenched with spray,
Deluged with the rainbow flushes;
Surplus water dashed away
To the lotus and the rushes.

Time was clothed in rippling fashion,.
Opulence of light and air,
Beauty changing into passion
Every hour and everywhere.

And the yearning of that race
Was for something deep and tender,
Life replete with power, with grace,
Touched with vision and with splendour.

Now no rain dissolves and cools,
Dew is even as a dream,
The enticing far-off pools
In a mirage only seem.

All the traces that remain,
Of the longings of that land,
Are two hands that plead in vain
Filled with burning sand.
please please help me

This is a very poignant poem and really captures the longing of history. It speaks of a people living in a golden age and striving to achieve the dreams and fantasies of a whole population. But now, many years later, their lush and verdant paradise has dried into an arid desert and where once the waters of life flowed so freely from the ground only a statue of a nation's dead dreams remains. And the statues hands now only cup the fitful dust of desolation rather than the vibrant, cool, life-sustaining waters of paradise. It is, in a sense, the rendering of every individual's, community's, and nation's destiny. We spend our years struggling to attain whatever our aspirations may be without knowing what the future holds. In too many instances, the glowing promise of the future holds only forlorn hands dripping dust instead of life.

Permanence, therefore, is an illusion because, as well all know, nothing lasts forever