Lines for a Prologue

By Archibald MacLeish 1892–1982 Archibald MacLeish

These alternate nights and days, these seasons

Somehow fail to convince me. It seems

I have the sense of infinity!

(In your dreams, O crew of Columbus,

O listeners over the sea

For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—)

Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden.

I thought, What time is it? I thought,

Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time?

(Tell me your dreams, O sailors:

Tell me, in sleep did you climb

The tall masts, and before you—)

At night the stillness of old trees

Is a leaning over and the inertness

Of hills is a kind of waiting.

(In sleep, in a dream, did you see

The world’s end? Did the water

Break—and no shore—Did you see?)

Strange faces come through the streets to me

Like messengers: and I have been warned

By the moving slowly of hands at a window.

Oh, I have the sense of infinity—

But the world, sailors, is round.

They say there is no end to it.

Archibald MacLeish, “Lines for a Prologue” from Collected Poems 1917-1982. Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952)

Biography

A poet, playwright, lawyer, and statesman, Archibald MacLeish's roots were firmly planted in both the new and the old worlds. His father, the son of a poor shopkeeper in Glasgow, Scotland, was born in 1837—the year of Victoria's coronation as Queen of England—and ran away first to London and then, at the age of eighteen, to Chicago. His mother was a Hillard, a family that, as Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren . . .

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