Classic Poem

See the cock on one leg standing,
With his diamond eye
Underneath his red cap hanging
Sidewards jauntily,
See him strut, and pause surveying
Life monarchically.

What is it his eye discovers,
What horizon fills
That round gaze so bright, so burnished,
What communication thrills
All the fiery red and blackness
Blooming on his quills?

Not a tiger, not a lion,
Not an eastern potentate,
Not a prophet out of Zion,
Not a western magnate
Gazed with such an agate vision
Outward upon fate!

Watch him slowly put his foot down:
Such deliberation,
The like of it was never found
In councils of a nation —
No emperor had such a mien
At his coronation.

Broods he there on ancient glory
By the holy river,
When he perched among the tree-tops,
And the silver shiver
Of the moonlight, falling, stirred that
Jewelled bird aquiver?

Beadily the Moon reflected
That round staring eye,
Watching all the forest murder —
Spotted tigers drifting by,
Hooded serpents, elephants
Sharpening curves of ivory.

Dim and wonderful that forest
In the moonlight melody,
All its dream leaf-cymbals ringing
As in whitest ecstasy
Glides the river, a moon-spirit
Through the forest shadowy.

Perched up high within the branches,
Black as night without a star,
Red as pools of blood in moonlight,
Silent as great flowers are,
Dreamed the violent, clanging sun-birds
Lustrous and bizarre.

Still he hears the glimmering river
Bubbling from the Moon,
And the insane, glittering forest
Shrieks like a baboon,
Dancing in a ring of white flowers
In the sky aswoon:

The white, the dim, tranced flowers of heaven
Naked, houri-pale they drift,
In the forest sleep their shadows,
Ghosts of gold the tigers lift
Their great heads by the cool moonbeam
Running through the forest swift.

Lilies, lilies, dreams of lilies,
Spectral orchids faint and dim,
Globular bright fruits hang ghostly
From his round eye's reddened rim,
In that tiny glittering circle
Stars and Moon and Forest swim.

Gone is all that pageant beauty,
Gone the forest's lyric song,
The Hosannas of the lotus,
Trumpetings of mammoths strong,
And the crying of the tigers
The dense banks of the Moon along!

Gone the panting, silent madness
Of love hunting magical,
Gone the soft and dreamy singing
Of still boughs fantastical,
Gone the slim white running rivers
In the gloom monastical!

Gone the spirits dark and chattering
Flitting through the countless trees,
Trooping slim, grotesque and agile
Hand in hand in companies;
Gone the distant, mournful tom-tom
Of some village mysteries!

Now a poor bedraggled prisoner
With a proud and scornful mien,
Living on a far-off memory,
Magnificence he ne'er has seen,
Two things only still remaining
Of the glory that has been:

The Moon that climbs o'er miles of houses
White and pitiful,
Floods the narrow green with splendour:
He stands sorrowful,
Lonely in the hollow circle
Of that vision wonderful.

Slowly in the east arises
Like a Dream the ancient Sun,
From within him bubbles upward
That loud hymn which once begun
Made blood-bright the dusky forest,
Golden all its rivers run.

Now the battled blood-red ruin,
Now the clouds of agony,
All earth's chanting, all earth's dying
Flame in that red eye,
Underneath its scarlet hanging
Cap of liberty.

And he chants forgotten splendours,
Chants of glory, come again,
All the Mountains round him singing,
Ringing cymbals Sky and Plain
Blaring to omnipotent tyrants
Their omnipotent disdain.