Assuming that what we work with is all of a kind,

Flowers or horses inbred with their betters;

Stones more or less the same size, some color range;

Or twenty-six new formations of the same alphabet;

Or window-openings; or students; or worship;-

No wonder we try hopefully to define style.

A man has his own stroke, but a day is not enough,

And he can repeat only his own kind of not repeating.

It may be laying floors, and a floor is a level

Or is nothing, but by his joinings a man is known,

And it is true God identifies certain prayers,

And that a few students remember their teachers.

I have never forgotten a man who, planning a road,

First built the hill in modeling clay on a board,

And ran his right thumb-end down around the slope,

The easy, the easiest way, as if to feel how the hill

Wanted it, if the road had to be there. But it was.

It was always there. The man did nothing but find it.

It is not style. The design is in the materials.

Look at anything, pots and pans on a wall hung,

The room someone else lives in, and re-arrange

Or restore the order clearly asking you its life,

For your life-giving hand's help to be what it meant.

There are not two ways, or three. You have no choice.

The laws were, and are, and the laws shall be;

Absolute and near and patient; each with its imperfect

Spokesman who has now and then his good days,

And beyond the truth he knows he knows, has even

A sight far-off of some with whom he is in company,

Architects, breeders, designers, conservators.