Now that the three- or four-hundred year old Mercer oak
has suddenly done a disappearing act
and given way under its black cloak
as a magician might suddenly succumb to his own magic, a tactician to his tact,

I cast about for an image of the present age
that might sustain
comparison with some ancient site of pilgrimage,
Stonehenge or Salisbury, only to catch it in the squared-off stain

on the retina, impossible to raze,
of the tower of the Graduate College.
At once rooted and restless, a survivor of the very craze
for "collegiate gothic" from which it sprang, it presents us with ledge

upon ledge of the great ledger of one hundred
years, ledge upon ledge where the mind has gone by strides
from Hart Crane’s The Bridge to Stephen Crane’s The Red
Badge of Courage, from Irvin Cobb’s Europe Revisited to William Cobbett’s Rural Rides,

from William Cobbett to Charles Dickens, Euripides to Michael Faraday, Geronimo
to Werner Heisenberg, Inigo to Mother Jones, John Maynard Keynes to John Locke,
Captain Midnight to Nerval, Nerval to Captain Nemo,
J. Robert Oppenheimer to Jackson Pollock,

Salvatore Quasimodo to Ayn Rand, Paul Strand to Charles Talleyrand, Miguel de Unamuno to Vera
Wang, Wayne Wang to Xenophon, William Butler Yeats to Yehuhi Menuhin, Yehudi Menuhin to Huddie Ledbetter
singing "Looky, Looky Yonder" so that, as we enter this new era,
the motto of "Bonus Intra Melior Exi (Enter Good, Leave Better)"

emblazoned there above the great hearth
may yet join with "Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations"
and another tower be raised, at once earth-fast and free of earth,
giving us back its ledge upon ledge of what Henry James might have termed our "grasping" imaginations.