Classic Poem

Let whoso will take sheets as wide
As some great wrestler's mountain-back.
Space cannot hide
His lack.

Take thou the panel, being strong.
'Tis as a girl's arm fashioned right —
As slender and divinely long
And white.

That tall and narrow icy space
Gives scope for all the brush beseems.
And who shall ask a wider place
For dreams?

It is an isle amid the tides —
A chink wherethrough shines one lone star —
A cell where calms of heaven hide
Afar.

One chosen curve of beauty, wooed
From out the harsh chaotic world,
Shall there in solitude
Be furled.

The narrow door shall be so strait
Life cannot vex, with troubled din,
Beauty, beyond that secret gate
Shut in.

Lo! I will draw two lovers there,
Alone amid their April hours,
With lines as drooping and as fair
As flowers.

I will make Spring to circle them
Like a faint aureole of delight.
Their luminous youth and joy shall stem
The night.

And men shall say: Behold! he chose,
From Time's wild welter round him strown,
This hour; and paid for its repose