Classic Poem

Poet of Cornish; comrade of his days:
When late we met,
With his remembrance how thine eyes were wet!
Thy faltering voice his praise
More eloquently did rehearse
Than on his festal day thy liquid verse.
Since once to love is never to forget,
Let us defer our plaint of private sorrow
Till some less unethereal to-morrow.
To-day is not the poet's shame
But the dull word's; not yet
Shall it be kindled at the living flame
Whose treasured embers
Ever the world remembers.
Not so the sculptor—his immediate bays
No hostile climate withers or delays:
Let us forego the debt of friendly duty;
A nation newly is bereft of beauty.
Sing with me now his undeferrèd fame,—
For Time impatient is to set
This jewel in his country's coronet.
When all men with new accent speak his name,
And all are blended in a vast regret,
There is no place for grief of thee or me:
One reckons not the rivers in the sea.
Sing not to-day the hearth despoiled of fire:
Ours be the trumpet, not the lyre.
Death makes the great
The treasure and the sorrow of the State.
Nor is it less bereaved
By what is unachieved.
Oh, what a miracle is Fame!
We carve some lately unfamiliar name
Upon an outer wall, as challenge to the sun;
And half its claim
Is deathless work undone.
Although the story of our art is brief,
Thrice in the record, at a fadeless leaf,
Falls an unfinished chapter; thrice the flower
Closed ere the noonday glory drank its dew;
Thrice have we lost of promise and of power—
The torch extinguished at its brightest hour—
His comrades all, for whom he twined the rue.
But though they stand authentic and apart
This is in our new land the first great grief of Art.