Classic Poem

Surprise to find it is not nonsense, first;
Next comes upon us doubting a cloud-burst
Of song, bold, free, triumphant in the power
Of a sun-quickened, sea-born thunder-shower
Breaking on green fields, gutters garbage-filled,
Street, garden, lane, with muddy rivulets rilled;
Then to the song-bird's notes and chirp of sparrows
Struck to the heart by sunlight, as with arrows,
Lo! in the sudden shining after rain
God on his England paints the sky of Spain.
Great Pan is dead! with every poet dead
From whose clear-piping reed the sound is fled,
Yet ever lingers upon land and sea,
Waiting for echoes from Eternity:
But thee, deep-breathing giant, on our shore
Aloud lamented by that voice of yore,
Heard from Arcadia by the wandering Greek
Thee, Delphic bard, what words, but thine can speak
—Seek to grasp stars in water, seize and hold
Shadows in darkness drowning, Proteus old
To marble turn! Yet metaphors there be
In thy own bold, untaught metonymy
For thee, expressing, in just sequence terse,
The poet's trinity, Thought, Feeling, Verse.
Hermes-Hephaestus this, wings on lame feet;
This, breath of Dawn, and odors of the street;
And this a deep drum, rattling and unstrung
With cymbal's clash and sound of trumpets flung
Along the discords.
But Hist! hark! heard I,
Saint John, thy eagle from its islet cry?
Or Jove, from lightning-lit Olympus, thine?
Or bird of Freedom, from some blasted pine,
Thy shriek defiant? Poet in thy dreams,
Like nature mingling what exists, and seems,
Do we the obscure, grotesque, fantastic see
In her, or bold interpreter, in thee?
But if, nor yet her jester nor her seer,
Each changing mood's inspired interpreter,
Mere histrion art thou? actor before all,
David and Achish, and in Naioth Saul?
“O serpent King!” from thy cross-bar come down,
In words articulate, say, art king or clown?
Or both? as Shakespeare and thy Rabelais are:
For men too wise, “motley's the only wear.”
Enigma, problem, god or druid stone,
Nay, Sphinx! dead Egypt's signature, unknown
Vast hieroglyphic! fill thy broken nose
And battered lips with sound like that which grows
In Memnon's statue as the slanting sun
Leaps upwards, and ere mental life is done,
Tell us the secret of thy mighty Nile:
While we the lotus eat, and dream and smile
In drowsy wonder, asking with a start
Is discord music? or has Art lost art?
And still this verseless verse upon our ears
Strikes in swift thoughts, like music of the spheres
Splintered to fragments, and in star-showers thrown
Wide through the air from one great central tone
That welding heavens to heavens, and earth to sea,
Binds God to Nature with its harmony.