Classic Poem

I shall never know where it came from. It was never inscribed.
The vacant scroll and its ornate spray of widely enwreathing tracery
were not engraved by hands that chisel to this day.
They were not engraved at all, but were tooled, pounded in, even to protrude inside — —
there to appear not crudely, but rather with naive assurance — —
were pounded in by practiced hands that were long ago lifeless, long ago lost to form, and now
are perchance no longer existent as the dust that might be called their own. They whose fingers clasped the new cup,
or clutched it, as my own have done, despairfully, distractedly,
are forgotten, even to their habitat. But the cup is mine.

There were at least a dozen such as this one, a glittering litter
of illustrious descent, born among the last of their kind,
and fostered by a motherly grande dame of lordly lineage, a buxom flagon
prodigious of flux, and prodigal, but nobly impartial — —
a mother who gave to all alike of what her bosom held,
responding now to need, and now to whim of want.
All through the last great days the mother gave,
though not more generously than carelessly, heedlessly even, unconsciously even — —
save for the subtle thrill to virtue going out.
But days of puerile complexity, inanely evil days, came crowding on,
to destroy the days that were great and simple, and destroyed them,
and with them the very source of the flow that filled the golden gullets.
The mother was now abandoned to languishment, was effete, helpless, lost.
Now came days of neglect, now days of separation, purposeless existence, wretched death,
or of the desolate waiting such as this cup must have known.

I treasure my chalice. I respond,
not more to its beauty, its romance, or the fact that my countrymen made it,
than to the thought that some creative American once clasped it — —
some one helping to create America, and surely drinking to his dream,
a dream that even then was doomed to the very fate of the chalice, or even to the fate of wretched death.
I respond to its want. I fill it. I clasp it.
I drink to the dream of having clasped it when it was new,
and of having drunk with other creators, to the virgin concept of America.