Thomas Hardy - Rome - Building a New Street, April 1887

Song Meaning

The poem opens with a stark image of Rome's ancient, decaying structures, described as "numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry" that "Outskeleton Time's central city." This initial scene emphasizes the skeletal remains of past grandeur, with every arch and dome laid bare in its "gaunt anatomy." The crumbling friezes and rotten metopes seem to offer a harsh lesson, inscribed like a "caustic monitory gnome," urging onlookers to "Learn here to spell Humanity!" This sets a tone of historical weight and perhaps a critique of human endeavors that ultimately fall to ruin. Yet, amidst this profound decay, a striking contrast emerges. The lyrics reveal "singing workmen" actively engaged in building a "frail new mansion" right within the "ruins' very shade." This juxtaposition highlights a peculiar human tendency: to build anew, seemingly oblivious to the passage of time and the inevitable decay that has claimed the magnificent structures surrounding them. The workmen "shape and set and join" their modern dwelling with "no apparent sense that years abrade," even as the "rent wall their feeble works invade." The poem's craft shines in its stark visual contrasts and the implied irony. The "gaunt anatomy" of ancient Rome, which once "shamed all such in power of pier and groin," now stands as a backdrop to the "frail new mansion." The workmen's modern construction, with its "stuccoed cove and quoin," is presented as fragile and temporary against the monumental, albeit ruined, past. This suggests a cyclical, perhaps even futile, human drive to create, unheeding of the lessons etched in the very stones they build upon. This tension between monumental ruin and ephemeral construction makes the lyrics resonate. The poem captures a poignant, almost melancholic, observation about human persistence and forgetfulness. It’s the quiet insistence of the present, represented by the singing workmen, pushing forward against the overwhelming evidence of the past's impermanence, that gives these lines their lasting impact.