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Cities and Thrones and Powers

[words Rudyard Kipling, music Peter Bellamy; notes on Cities and Thrones and Powers at the Kipling Society]

Cities and Thrones and Powers is a poem from Rudyard Kipling’s book Puck of Pook’s Hill. Peter Bellamy sang it unaccompanied on his fourth album of songs set to Kipling’s poems, Keep on Kipling.

Lyrics

Cities and Thrones and Powers

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die.
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year’s:
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
“See how our works endure!”