Classic Poem

Out of the pattering flame-reflective street
Into the Abbey move my adagio feet,
Out of the lofty lamp-lit London dusk
Ferrying through vaulted sanctuaries a head
Calm, vesper-tolling, and subdued to shed
Gross thoughts and sabbatize the intemperate husk

Gazing around, I glimpse the illustrious Dead:
Assembled ancestries of England loom.
Here, on this Second Sunday after Epiphany ,
Milton and Purcell triumph from the tomb;
Spirits aspire on solemn-tongued antiphony,
And from their urns immortal garlands bloom

Poets, musicians, orators, and Abstractions
Sponsorial, guard the suppliant congregation.
Fame with mum trumpet, posturing ripe attractions,
Sustains her simpering Eighteenth-Century station;
While Shakespeare , shy 'mid History's checked polemic,
Muses incognizant of his translation
Into a lingual culture-epidemic.
Charles Wesley; Isaac Watts; each now enjoys
Hymnistic perpetuity from boys
Chanting like scarlet-cassocked seraphim:
Here saintly Keble waits his Evening Hymn,
And hearkens, quiet, confident and humble.

John Gay looks glum . . . A clergyman ascends
The pulpit steps; smooths with one hand his hair,
And with the other hand begins to fumble
At manuscript of sermon. We prepare
Patience to listen. But Disraeli bends
Forward a little with his sceptic stare.
Time homilizes on. Grave ghosts are gone.
Diction has turned their monuments to stone:
Dogma has sent Antiquity to sleep
With sacrosanct stultiloquential drone
But cryptical convulsions of the Past
Pervade the benediction's truce and sweep
Out on the organ's fugue-triumphal tone
When hosannatic Handel liberates us at last.