Classic Poem

Perhaps I owe to my temerity
Some lost advantages of little force;
At life's outgoing they will quit my corse,
I shall have seen what I desired to see,
Eye-single, not with Ishmael's remorse,
But by the beam of nature given me.
Some question Shakespere for his way apart,
Because invited little by the great;
He kept his pedigree, a country heart,
And laureated was to illustrate.
Than imitation is no meaner fate,
To be respectable is not to rise;
There is a strength that does not borrow state,
It is to serve the light within thine eyes.