Classic Poem

In Pisa once, within the Baptistery
I well remember, the astonished ear
Took sounds too sweet for earth. For as we stood
Beneath the fretted ambit of the dome
The poor guide lifted a worn voice, not sweet,
But skilled to evoke the subtle harmonies
Which lurked in those dim heights; a common voice
And earthy as the accents, coarse and dull,
Of some street singer at a tavern door,
Frighting the midnight street; some hackneyed phrase
Stolen from the Missal-book, so poor and flat
We fain had silenced it
But hark! but hark!
Ere it is done what heavenly harmonies
Flout those poor tones of earth. The ambient air
Seems filled with voices, voices everywhere,
Of some angelic choir, which swell, which beat,
Reverberating; circling waves of sound,
Now single, doubled now, and resonant
And grown together, and interlaced and lost
In some unearthly sweetness mystical,
Till all the enchanted vault is charged with joy,
As when of old, hid on their perilous isle,
The lurking Sirens drew the listening crews;
Or as the chanting quires which soar and fall
In hoary fanes; or the aërial flights
Of the angelic host whose heavenly tones
The rapt Cecilia heard; or those white ranks
Of gold-haired Seraphs, chanting row on row,
With viol and voice and trump, the painter saw
And filled with high-pitched music for all time
Though no sound come.—Anon the circling tides,
Ebbing and flowing through the stately round
Of that great dome, are driven back, wave on wave,
High, repercussive, till they sink and die,
Like fairy ripples of a summer sea,
In sweetness, and transform themselves and flow
In some low gracious melody which sighs,
Fainter and fainter, to its perfect close,—
As 'twere the soaring, rapt, angelic choir.
Which vanished in heaven's vault and left earth dumb
Of music, first the uplifted, pealing, high
Archangels' trumpets, then the chanting saints,
And then the faint child-angels' voices last.