Classic Poem

Haunted , alone, withdrawn, in some dread spot,
Remote from men and all their burdened way,
There is a lyre whereon the mad winds play
The sad old songs of dead gone yesterday;
Those splendid dreams of olden eld forgot,
'Mid all the world's loud fray.

It holds all chords of those forgotten tunes,
Those great weird dreams of peoples lost and gone,
Their pride and passion, all their olden woe,
Long past and vanished. Now these strings upon
Only the winds of unremembering blow,
Where erstwhile sang the gold of Attic dawn,
Sad tragedy, or splendid epic glow.

Ages ago great Homer sought this place,
And thundered on its strings the world's old woes
Of gods and men, and smote in golden hours
Of mighty song those rich eternal throes
Of Helen and of fallen Ilium's towers.
Euripides in dreams here sought the base,
Sombre and great, of Greek dramatic song,
In saddest notes of ancient woe and wrong.

Mantuan Virgil, honey in his mouth,
Sang to its chords in eclogues languorous,
Of Tityrus' beeches, and the wet warm south;
Or with Æneas wrecked the world again,
Dying anew in dart of Dido's pain.

Stern Dante came and smote its chords in woe,
So deep and dark, high heaven and hell between,
That nature shuddered, hell from deeps below
Leaped up in anguish of her lurid sheen.
Here rang his song immortal, to the air,
Bemoaned dead Beatrice on its silvern strings,
That splendid woe beyond all woe's compare,
In sonorous dirge of death's imaginings.

Shakespeare the mighty, loftiest of our days,
Here ran the subtle gamut of all things,
Uttering the human heart and its weird maze
Of love and hate and hope and dread despair,
Those woes all hearts have sighed unto the air,
Until from out its molten notes there ran
The godlike, golden melody of man,
And Song, enfranchised, from her wintry ban,
Rose larklike, heavenward on ethereal wings.

Milton, epic splendor of our tongue,
The dew of poesy on great heart and lips,
Smote here his lofty notes in Titan song
Of mighty Lucifer in dark eclipse
Of high ambition's failure headlong flung.

And he of Ayr, old earth's immortal child,
Found its rare chords attuned to his hot heart,
And smote a note across the world's bleak wild,
Ennobling amid its frenzied smart.

Here later came in mad or holy mirth,
A motley crew attuned to earth's old song;
High Coleridge, subtlest spirit of his kind,
Shelley, child of heaven, like the wind,
In joy or passion, kissing, spurning earth;

Keats, sad Greek of fated alien birth;
Wordsworth, gentle shepherd of the mind;
And rarest of all this rare belated throng,
Sad Byron, mighty child of music's saddest wrong.

Now its great chords are silent; seldom now
The lonely wanderer touches its dead strings,
He of the honeyed mouth and fated brow,
Waking anew the world's imaginings;
For gold and grim ambition hold men's hearts,
All life is sordid, and a maddened cry
Goes up like smoke from its great thronged marts,
Where Truth lies slain of Mammon's deadly darts,
And Love and Beauty, clip of their rare wings.

Only the winds of Autumn, sonorous, sad,
Thunder in discords strange its strings among,
Ringing the vibrant note of some old mad
Forgotten chord or surgent battle song:
Some weird lost passion, hatred, love or woe,
Wherewith the dead world loved, or slew its foe,
Or thrilled to splendor when its heart was young.