Classic Poem

The Sculptor

Leap up into the light, ye living Forms!
And plant amid men your birthright feet;
Angry and fierce as the maned thunder's storms,
And as the lightning beautiful and fleet.
Of quick and thoughtful souls the truest thoughts,
Born of the marble at Heaven's happy hour —
Ye blessed Realities! who strike the doubts
Begot of speech, dumb, with your better power.

Human and life-like with no sense of pain,
Come forth, crowned heroes of the early age,
Chieftain and soldier, senator and sage —
Benignant, wise and brave again!
Would the soul clothe itself in elder gloom —
Let stand upon the cliff and in the shadowy grove,
The tawny ancient of the warrior race,
With dusky limb and flushing face,
Diffusing Autumn through the stilly place —
For battle stern, or soothed for love.

Or should a spirit of a larger scope
Seek to express itself in sacred stone:
Cast, life-long, on the mountain-slope
Or seat upon the starry mountain-cone,
Colossal and resigned, the gloomy gods
Eying at large their lost abodes,
Towering and swart and knit in every limb,
With brows on which the tempest lives,
With eyes wherein the past survives;
Gloomy and battailous and grim.

Think not too much what other climes have done,
What other ages: with painful following, weary —
Each step thou takest darkens thy natural sun,
And makes thy coming course, thy by-gone, dreary.
Let the soul in thee lift its awful front,
Facing the Universe that stands before it;
Beaten by day and night and tempests' brunt,
All shapes — all glorious passions shall cross o'er it.
Forth from their midst some forms will leap
That other souls have never disencumbered,
And up shall spring through all the broad-set land,
The fair white people of thy love unnumbered.