Classic Poem

Old friend, long dead, who yet can thrive
More in my heart than men alive
Because in you the flame lived more
Than ever since the days of yore
When, everywhere that Rome was known,
The post-triumphal silence shone,
And in the vespertinal hush
The trumpet yielded to the thrush:
Because those days you could restore:
Aeternae lucis Redditor.

You shared with us the mood serene
That ruled the universal scene
When Peace was guardian of the poor,
And only rusty was the door
Of Janus, and the pillared shade
Revealed the studious colonnade:
The toga with the purple hem,
The temple that with quiet flame
Acclaimed the distant Emperor,
Aeternae lucis Redditor.

Too seldom on this world of ours
Unwrackt the eternal radiance pours.
Again we shall not see it pour
As in the days and nights before
We lost the wide Virgilian calm;
Days when we sought to earn the palm —
Through the endowment of a wit
Which made us eligible for it —
From you who were Wit's arbiter,
Aeternae lucis Redditor.

'Twixt you and me and me and those
Irremeable the River flows
Since we beheld with joy and awe
The light by which blind Homer saw.
And not again in this our time
Shall sound magnanimous the rhyme;
The wolves have torn our pleasant folds,
And the Great Wall no longer holds.
But Love can bridge the Stygian shore,
Aeternae lucis Redditor.