In the elder days of Art,/ Builders wrought with greatest care/ Each minute and unseen part;/ For the Gods see everywhere.

 In the elder days of Art,

  Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

  For the Gods see everywhere.

”How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality—how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine’s City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of Anselm, St. Bernard’s sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas’ Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus? How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of millions of dollars on the campuses of American universities?” — Thomas Merton, from The Seven Storey Mountain

A dovecote 

Thomas Merton

All are architects of Fate,

 Working in these walls of Time:

Some with massive deeds and great,

 Some with ornaments of rhyme.

 

Nothing useless is, or low;

 Each thing in its place is best;

And what seems but idle show

 Strengthens and supports the rest.

 

For the structure that we raise,

 Time is with materials filled;

Our to-days and yesterdays

 Are the blocks with which we build.

 

Truly shape and fashion these;

 Leave no yawning gaps between;

Think not, because no man sees,

 Such things will remain unseen.

 

In the elder days of Art,

 Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

 For the Gods see everywhere.

 

Let us do our work as well,

 Both the unseen and the seen;

Make the house, where Gods may dwell,

 Beautiful, entire, and clean.

 

Else our lives are incomplete,

 Standing in these walls of Time,

Broken stairways, where the feet

 Stumble as they seek to climb.

 

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,

 With a firm and ample base;

And ascending and secure

 Shall to-morrow find its place.

 

Thus alone can we attain

 To those turrets, where the eye

Sees the world as one vast plain,

 And one boundless reach of sky.

 

The Builders,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow