Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany 1915

The Raft-Builders

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making

rafts upon doomed ships.

   When we break up under the heavy years and go down into

eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost

rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea.  They will not

carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two

and little else.

   They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day,

they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm

their hands and to distract their thoughts from their

certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship

breaks up.

   See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very

tranquility deadlier than tempest.  How little all our keels

have troubled it.  Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous

whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things --

small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden

evenings -- and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole

ships.

   See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and

something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings

and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old

centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make

a darkness round Persepolis.

   For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on

the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

   Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

   There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.