Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rhythmbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.

The line imagines poetry as humanity’s earliest durable “technology” for preserving thought—older than writing on clay tablets and more resistant to decay. By stressing “verse and line” and being “rhythmbound,” it points to meter and rhythm as mnemonic structures that let communities carry language across generations through oral transmission. The claim that such words “defy time and age” frames poetry as a cultural archive: even when materials perish, patterned speech can survive in memory, performance, and later transcription. Implicitly, it elevates poets as custodians of collective memory and suggests that art precedes and outlasts record-keeping.