Classic Poem

It sprang from the brows of a star
And it lives with the life of the world,
It appeared like the lightning of God
Through the dust of Eternity hurled.

And much as a luminous thought
May shine through the dusk of a dream,
It awoke in the childhood of light
And crimsoned the twilight with gleam.

It arose in the first blade of grass
That brake the stone mountains apart,
And it budded and blossomed and bloomed
Till it stirred in the human heart.

And the centuries freighted with life
Have trembled at touch of its flame,
And lips where its lyric was warm
Have laboured to give it a name.

It inspires the voices of birds,
The dædalian tremor of earth,
When the passion of increate spring
Moves the heart to ineffable mirth.

It suspires in scent from the rose
And in midsummer's satiate rest;
It is rich through the veins of the world,
Like milk in a woman's deep breast.

It burdens thy murmurous lips
When love in thy spirit is warm—
My lover the sea, it is thou
As it thrones in thy splendour of storm.

'Tis the pride of the arm and the loin
That thrives in the sinews of war,
And puts forth in the whiteness of death
Like life in the dawn of a star.

And though life is grown tired and old,
And the treasures of heart and of soul
Are sold for a handful of coin,
It stirs with a vital control

In man and in woman and earth,
As on Sappho's lips haunted with flame,
Or as under the hand of the Christ
It burned—it is ever the same.

And while ever the sunrise returns
It shall still be the power that can
Make the heart to grow pallid with love
Or a man die the death of a man.