A little humility, please
The Breakers, the most famous of the Newport man mansions.
“The house of stone turns its back on town
To govern an Atlantic even sky can’t stop.
Big as a museum, it keeps us off the lawn
With chain-link fences camouflaged by rose hips.
Presiding from this height, it says Look on
My works, ye Mighty and despair!’’
From Carole Simmons Oles’s “On the Cliff Walk at Newport, Rhode Island, Thinking of Percy Bysshe Shelley’’