Classic Poem

Now driven by restless energy for song
I touched the lyre with eager trembling hands;
Not to a sylvan goddess held among
The golden hierarchy of dim lands
Do I lift up mine eyes, and call to bless
With inspiration my too humble praise
By being vivid in her loveliness;
Nor do I seek among the ruinous ways
And desolation of forgotten realms
For some immortal fragment of the past, —
Perchance
A hero's storied lance;
Or for a shining ensign borne above the helms
Of galleys that once warred for empires vast,
A standard that in fancy gleams again,
The splendid symbol of a splendid strife
Upon the wine-dark main, —
And, gleaming, casts its shadow down upon
The bended head of her who was the wife
Of Spartan Menelaus, but anon
Will lift o'er Ilium her hand that lies
Now listlessly across her dreaming eyes.

Of no heroic days these numbers are,
Nor goddess worshipped in her sacred grove;
There is a Spirit ruling from afar
Who hath created Song and Dreams and Love;
Who, when the world was only night and space
Across the darkness scattered stars to sing;
Who, when the world was but a sleeping place
Awakened it unto the sweet first Spring;
Then were the depths melodious with seas,
And all the lands that rose above their flood
Were gladdened by the green of grass and trees, —
And over all a sun that stained like blood
The dewy mists that veiled the tremulous dawn;
And through the fresh fair forest ways there moved
Perchance a startled fawn
Quick followed by a fleeting maid —
Who being seen was loved
By one whose eyes had made her all afraid!

It is of Beauty that I fain would sing,
And she did lend me from her voice a note
That I such praises as are meet might bring
To her who knoweth each bird's warbling throat!
She is the unseen presence in a song,
The grace within each flower's slender stem,
The lily that is white, the rose of wrong,
The fire and fever in each gleaming gem;
And every murmurous wind repeats her name,
And it is chanted by the waves that roll,
It is her breath that fans the Autumn's flame
In leaves whose crimson death eludes the gloom;
And love of Beauty is the soul, —
That fragment of a life untouched by doom,
The yearning to create, to never die,
The high, divine, eternal cry
Aspiring from the changing sod, —
The common attribute of man and god!