Ideal Poet, An
Take Marlowe's splendid and impassioned heart,
Full of divine Elizabethan fire:
Take Shelley's tenderness, and Shelley's lyre,
And touch dim heights wherethrough strange star-beams dart:
Take Hugo's sovereign love and sense of Art,
And Musset's sweet insatiable desire,
And Byron's wrath at king and priest and liar —
These diverse gifts to one swift soul impart: —
Then over and above these several powers
Add Christ's own changeless spirit of love for men;
Mix Shelley's love for stars and birds and flowers
With Christ's unfathomed and immortal pain, —
With some such mingling of yet unmixed hours
Shall poets of the future sing and reign.
Full of divine Elizabethan fire:
Take Shelley's tenderness, and Shelley's lyre,
And touch dim heights wherethrough strange star-beams dart:
Take Hugo's sovereign love and sense of Art,
And Musset's sweet insatiable desire,
And Byron's wrath at king and priest and liar —
These diverse gifts to one swift soul impart: —
Then over and above these several powers
Add Christ's own changeless spirit of love for men;
Mix Shelley's love for stars and birds and flowers
With Christ's unfathomed and immortal pain, —
With some such mingling of yet unmixed hours
Shall poets of the future sing and reign.
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