Classic Poem

Nothing is what it seems. You pierce the forms
With deeper vision, ere you find their soul,
But then you find it better than it seems.
In darkness beauty hides, but peeps anon
Around the corners of the night and laughs
In rippling morn, is coy and blushes rose
When caught, then smiles her gladness to the eyes
Of her true poet-lover, and, content,
Rests joyous on the bosom of the day.
In silence music lingers, throbbing there
All voiceless, till, like some sweet nightingale,
Joy sets the heart aflame, the spirit free,
To fill the yearning soul of night with praise.

The background of my life, though stern and sad.
Was not all loneliness, for jeer and jibe,
Exile and want, seemed naught when I could claim
The noble loyalty of such a friend
As thou, dear Liszt. Oh, not in vain was toil!
Even sluggard fame might wait. It mattered not
If I might hear thy finger-tips, inspired
By boundless love of music and of me,
Flame out the drama of my soul; could see
Thy tear-filled eyes proclaim my work divine.
When all the world was frowning darkly yet,
I found such comfort here as angels bring;
When exiled, where the lonely mountains heaped
Before my eyes their grave solemnity
And dwarfed my human schemes with show of power,
How could my faith have stood so steadfastly
And never dwindled to evanishment,
Had not thy faith sustained mine own? Oh, Friends,
If fame is surely coming, as ye say,
To lay immortal honours on my brow.
All ye must share the triumph of my name
And join it to the glory of your own!

Most dear Cosima, I would tell the world
How white the vestal fire within my soul
Flamed to the sacred torch of thy pure love.
Thou too shalt reap my fame with me—thine own,
For who shall say that love is less than toil.
Ah, Love is all. It cancels every pain,
Erases care, and sorrow banishes;
It moves the soul to all sublimities,
And ends the evil in long-promised good.
Thus was the bleakness of my life assuaged,
And all my pain and loneliness made sweet
When great soul-thirst impassioned all my song.

No fine emotion can impel the soul
To strong expression till the sifting light
Of sorrow cleanse the spirit of all dross;
Till irresistible necessity
Push him through pain to fortitude, through storms
To power, to reach, by toilsome ways, the hills
Of dream. Soul music, passion-born, and framed
In noble score and rare libretto, like
All works of God, though child of sound and Art,
Is all conceivèd by the Holy Ghost.

Pastime to most, Music to me is fire
Of longing, urge of aspiration, stress
Of unfulfilled desire. I fling my own
Hot heart into the crucible of truth,
Mix with the subtle alchemy of love,
And set it deep into the fiery soul
Of Being. When the whole is now become
Transparent as the eye of innocence,
I pour it into moulds of mightiest Art
To fill the bowl of all the years with song;
For Art translates the essence of all things
To terms of life.

It is a sacrament
To pioneer new paths of song, discern
New laws for making music, until now
The liquid art; to make it solid too,
Massive and mountainous; to sculpture it,
Shaping from Andean peaks the domes and towers
Of temples bathed in floods of golden light
And swept by storms; to chisel monuments
Of music, which anon do melt and sink
To sudden seas whose billows roll and crash,
Breaking upon life's beaches everywhere,
Foaming and turbulent.

Of late, my soul
Conceived a noble theme, which, as I hope,
If force and fire of inspiration hold
Their present course, shall be a thing of power.
Tannhäuser sings the unappeasèd cry
Of desolation where heart-hunger reigns
And hopeless dearth. What now I do
Shall add to this and Lohengrin a field
So lofty in its promise that the three
Shall constitute a solemn trilogy,
Whose voice shall ring upon the battlefield
The storm of conflict, waged 'twixt sense and soul
In life's tremendous war. The Nibelung's song
Portrays the struggle of the human heart
By passion tossed, now by the sense enslaved,
Anon upholden by the soul, and tuned
To nobler purposes by grip of fate's
Inexorable hand; but this shall show,
If I can so contrive, a glimpse of God.
The soul's divine, immeasurable claim
To be supreme above the urge of sense.
This is my hope in Parsifal.