Classic Poem

There is a plant that blossoms at midnight
And fosters in itself a sombre dawn;
And some in passion only find delight
Leaping to sorrow, like seed furnace-drawn;

But thou upon the forces that enslave
Breakest like light, where the deep chasms immure,
For thou art of the race of them that save,
And where thy footstep passes it makes pure.

Like the first hour of morning, sleep-washed, free,
When every pulse of man's collected soul
Ascends to be what it was born to be,
Returning like the needle to the pole,

Noiselessly as a perfume or a prayer,
Or lake-born cloud, the flame that in thee lies
Unseals over the mountains of dense care
The welling golden water of sunrise.