Classic Poem

The records of a life should a be a poem;
We need not go abroad for stones to build
Our monumental glory; every soul
Has in it the material for its temple.
The universal beauty is our own;
We steep our thoughts in sunsets, and we hang
Our adoration on the morning star,
And yet from us they get that alchemy
Whereby they strangely move us. Nought is ours
But that which has gone from us. Therefore 'tis
That disappointments often tread upon
The toes of expectation. Things without
Are bare until we clothe them. Let us seek
Each one our gods in our immediate heaven:
There is no breathing for us in another;
But either is the air too coarse and weighs
Like nightmare on our thoughts, or 'tis too fine,
And, like the atmosphere of mountain tops,
Usurps the brain, and finds insidious way
Into its chambers, pressing out the soul,
Till death o'ercome us in the guise of sleep.

Yet all may grow to live upon the heights;
Deep thought and action of the soul make close
The fibres of the brain, so that no air,
However fine, can press the spirit out;
In time thus fitting us for another heaven
Above what was our own.

Our truest life
Is Thought , high and sincere, and to ourselves.
When eyes are felt upon us we are players,
And life becomes untrue. We may not mark
The Poet's phrensy, when the stars and he
Are revelling in night, and all the winds
Are bringing music to their jubilee.
Did we but look in with unhallow'd eyes,
He would be all in darkness, and the stars
Beaming, unconscious, in their heavenly places,
And all the winds gone back into the forests.
So, nothing of his phrensy can be known,
Save what his rhymes blab out to knowing readers —
And yet that phrensy is his truest life.

True thought blends into beauty, and we all
Are poets when we reach it. Could we give
The records of this thought — this our true life —
The records of our life would be a poem.