Classic Poem

Pan —did you say he was dead, that he'd gone, and for good—
Gone with the Dryads and all of the shy forest faces?
Who was it then plucked your sleeve as you came through the wood,
What of the whisper that waits in the oddest of places?

Pan of the garden, the fold,
Pan of the bird and the beast,
Kindly, he lives as of old,
He isn't dead in the least!

Yes, you may find him to-day (how the reeds twitter on,
Tuneful, as once when he followed young Bacchus's leopards);
Stiffer he may be, perhaps, since our moonlight has shone
Centuries long on his goat-horns—old Pan of the shepherds!

Brown are his tatters, his tan
Roughened from tillage and toil,
Pagan and homely, but Pan—
Pan of the saPand the soil!

Find him, in fact, in the Park when the first crocus cowers;
Cockney is he when it suits him, I know that he knocks his
Crook at my window at times o'er sixpenn'orth of flowers,
Gives me his blessing anew with my fresh window-boxes!

——Piping the leaf on the larch,
Piping the nymphs (in the Row),
Piping a magic of March,
Just as he did long ago!