Classic Poem

Lo , truth to tell you, I have sometimes thought
Strange things about those vague and nameless guests
We call poetic fancies — Whence they spring,
And why they come to pierce, like shafts of gold,
The million-threaded web of this dull life:
Why they — celestial formed, should come at all,
To wait, with timid-seeming, unshod feet,
Upon the chilly threshold of this world,
And with soft-dimpled, hesitating hands,
Stand, knocking at the heart's unfriendly door.
And yet they come: those silent, heavenly forms;
Through what fierce straits, what horror-hedged ways.
What labyrinthine woes, we can but guess.