Classic Poem

I

These logs with drama and with dream are rife;
Through all their golden Summers and green Springs
With leaf and root they sucked the forest's life,
Drank of its secret, deep, essential things;
Its breathing hushes stirred of faery wings;
Its garnered fervours of a vanished day —
This sap shrills with the chant the cricket flings
Across the hawthorn-scented dusks of May,
Here on his firefly steed Puck mounts and darts away.

II

But stir the fire and bid the fancies come!
Masques of a hundred lusk forgotten Junes
Moving across the lit proscenium,
A hundred August nights and April noons
Bringing their midwood moods and mystic runes —
A quick life that the gross eye never sees
Still briefly wakes beneath propitious moons
For still the lovelier, elder deities
Through favoured forests pass in transient pageantries.

III

'Twas by this burning log but yesteryear
The hoofed Pan lay couch'd with crafty flute,
And though these shaken flames his song I hear —
There, in yon hollow, snake and horned brute
And ramping satyr gather, stricken mute,
With held glee waiting and withholden shout
Until the music, rending heart and root,
Shall pluck the shag oak's red-lipp'd secret out
And a brown Dryad wreathe herself into their rout.

IV

But stir the fire and bid the dream be fleet —
Blown hair of nymph that flashes, and the drift
Of blowing petals tossed by flashing feet,
And leafy laughter rippling on from rift
To rift across the wood, torn vines that lift
Their brambled jealousy to stay the race —
Ah, through the forest's heart its blood runs swift!
And all the amorous Summer's fiery grace
Leaps in the following faun, glows in the panting chase.

V

Or Druid visions mingle with the Greek,
And in the flames a paler flame I see,
Where spectral priests in coiled procession seek
The consenting forest's midmost secrecy —
Vague shades amid its shadowy mystery —
Then priests and altars down the tumbling air
Are driven like fogs across an autumn lea,
And this that was a goddess's whorled hair
Is smoke again, and but the single flame is there.

VI

'Tis rather in some dream's obliquity
That we see Beauty, seldom face to face. . . .
Sometimes the embers of antiquity,
Fanned of thought's pinions, glow a little space,
Hinting of that old world's lyric grace,
Then gleam and vision tremble and are gone ...
But stir the fire! The forest in this place
Unlocks its heart of many a dusk and dawn
And golden moon reprieved from oblivion.

VII

Nay, 'tis these transient and most fragile things,
Forever dying, that can never die!
The gleams that shimmer off their passing wings
When jocund gods go luminously by
Pierce to his spirit through the watcher's eye
And in its texture shine perpetual.
One ageless beauty through eternity,
Creating creeds that rise and reign and fall,
Dies into life again and triumphs over all.