Segesta

High in the secret places of the hills
Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude,
No ruin but a vision unachieved.

This temple is a house not made with hands
But born of man’s incorrigible need
For permanence and beauty in the scud
And wreckage of mortality—as though
Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns
With inward isolation and deep peace,
And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet,
Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold,
The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade,
And, night-long woven through the fane’s august
Intercolumniations, all the stars
Processionally wheeling—

                                                Then it was
That, having reared their wonder, it would seem
The makers feared their God might prove less great
Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left
The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 26, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Segesta” is included in Edith Wharton’s 1926 collection Twelve Poems (The Medici Society). Referring to the ancient Elymian city located in northwestern Sicily, “Segesta” is one of Wharton’s numerous works featuring physical or metaphorical ruins. About this overarching theme among Wharton’s texts, Margarida São Bento Cadima, a scholar of Wharton, writes in her dissertation “The world is a welter”: Gardens, Mountains and Ruins in Edith Wharton’s Fiction (University of Glasgow, 2021), “That monumental ruins and garden ‘follies’ carry such affective and symbolic resonance in her oeuvre is owing partly to her incisive treatment of John Ruskin’s cultural theories, especially his powerful conception of the ‘voicefulness’ of crumbling masonry, where the living and the dead seem to be in complex and eerie dialogue. Overall, then, Wharton’s oeuvre can be construed as a form of ‘imaginative archeology,’ in which she excavates personal experience with a view to restructuring it in her fictions.”