"Gods Make Their Own Importance"

When it comes to Utopias, Max Beerbohm has the final word:

          In a Copy of More's (or Shaw's or Wells's
                or Plato's or Anybody's) Utopia

          So this is Utopia, is it?  Well
          I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.

And still some of those among us persist.  But truisms are, well, true.  For instance:  The more things change, the more things stay the same.   Thomas Hardy knew this:  "Only thin smoke without flame/From the heaps of couch-grass;/Yet this will go onward the same/Though Dynasties pass."  ("In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'," Stanza II.)  Utopians (our modern-day scolds, nannies, and self-styled "progressives") are always ignorant (blissfully or not) of this:  "Gods make their own importance." 

                                 Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided:  who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel --
'Here is the march along these iron stones.'
That was the year of the Munich bother.  Which
Was most important?  I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said:  I made the Iliad from such
A local row.  Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance With Kitty Strobling and Other Poems (1960).  According to the OED, a "rood" is "a unit of land area equal to 40 square rods (a quarter of an acre), but varying locally."  A "march" is a boundary.

                                Charles Mahoney, "The Garden" (1950)