Classic Poem

The great poets revealed the confidences of the muse,
The great musicians made melodious the harsh accents of the quarreling world,
The great orators were lips to the betrayed humanities and converted dead saws and axioms into sweet cries for justice,
The great painters turned sorrow and gladness into color and rallied upon the dead canvas the dispersed dreams of defeat,
The great doctors rescued life from disease,
The great mothers died for their thankless and thankful children,
The great soldiers perished in the madness of battle believing that righteousness found its seal in their blood,
The great children were faithful to the decrepit and accepted sweetly the parent tyrannies,
The great reformers put all earth in their fires and purified it.
Before all these my lifted voice confessed my humiliation,
Towards all these I cried for busy men to stop from workaday slaveries and look,
I acclaimed their names everywhere, I took all other words and deeds away and left only theirs:
So had they convinced me, so had they fixed in the accidental day the stars of their destinies.
But after my satisfied heart had grown strong doing this penance,
I myself, reincarnated, discovered my own renown —
Heard great poems, songs, orations, more piercing, undeniable, competing within for province,
The painters mixing immortal colors out of my personal experience, the doctors healing, the darling mothers patient to the end, and soldiers heroic, children filial and reformers prophetic:
These mine, fragments of me, voicing me, expressing the frame my body and the love my soul,
These, not greater or less, but mine, not seeking by comparison the gifts of the judge,
These, not great to the world, not great to me, but fitting me better than the great,
These, demanding the prior right and the final word.