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The Altar

1892 –

1982

I built an unnamed altar in my heart,
And sculptured sacred garlands for a frieze
From delicately petalled memories,—
The fragrance of a word, the fragile art
Of ash-gold hair, dim visioned things that start
With radiant wings from mist of reveries,
And vanish at the telling as a breeze
Blurs mirrored stars in dark pools set apart.

But, as I worshiped reverently there
The symbols of the beautiful, there came
A light aslant the shadows of my prayer
That silenced mine uplifted lips with shame.
The garlands coldly carven in that fair
Unmeaning tracery enscrolled—thy name.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Born in 1892, Archibald MacLeish was a poet, critic, and playwright who fought in World War I. MacLeish was awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times, and he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1946 to 1949. He died in 1982.

About Archibald MacLeish

Themes

About this Poem

“The Altar” appears in Archibald MacLeish’s third poetry collection, Tower of Ivory (Yale University Press, 1917). In his article, “Archibald MacLeish and the Poetics of Public Speech: A Critique of High Modernism,” professor of English John Timberman Newcomb says, “MacLeish found himself in a position to mount effective critiques of high-modernist thinking because he, no less than an Eliot or a Tate, had grown up within its frame of reference. A comfortable childhood in suburban Illinois, a clubbish education at Yale and Harvard […]. The poet who had entitled [sic] his first book of 1917 Tower of Ivory had much aristocratic cultural baggage to carry with him into the 1930s. But, as MacLeish remarked in the early 1980s, ‘once back in the United States and face to face with the Great Depression and the horrors of that time, it became perfectly apparent that you couldn’t keep your self-respect and hide that way.’”

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More by this poet

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

Archibald MacLeish

1926

Imagery

The tremulously mirrored clouds lie deep,
Enchanted towers bosomed in the stream,
And blossomed coronals of white-thorn gleam
Within the water where the willows sleep—
Still-imaged willow-leaves whose shadows steep
The far-reflected sky in dark of dream;
And glimpsed therein the sun-winged swallows seem
As fleeting memories to those who weep.

Archibald MacLeish

2015

An Eternity

There is no dusk to be,
   There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
   And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of
   Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
   White peach bough.

Dying shall never be
   Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
   Death never was.

Archibald MacLeish

1917

Poems

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The Altar

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