Classic Poem

How dim, how drear, these narrow streets,
These London streets before the dawn!
What solitude the stroller meets,
What sense of human life withdrawn!

Down alleys where the darkness gropes
What mad and mocking phantoms lurk—
Phantoms of daydreams and of hopes
Fled to thin air and lost in murk!

Daydreams once all his own, and hopes
That, fluttering gay with frolic sports,
Led him a witch-dance up the slopes
Beyond his quiet college courts;

Up to the town with all its sway,
Its stir of letters and of art,
Players, and playhouse, and the play
Where he should bear his tragic part—

Through midnight streets, as now, should bear,
Forlorn and fierce, his tragic part,
No bright hopes beckoning, but despair
Laying a chill hand on his heart.

Fair Magdalen tower, bright Oxford spires,
In fancy fading on the view,
How softly fall your topmost fires
As down these streets he looks at you!

How kindly seems, this lonesome night,
The shelter that you used to give
While in your walls he longed for flight,
And longed a larger life to live.

And he the larger life full soon
Has lived, and all its joys has learned,
Has touched an antique lyre to tune—
And song and singer have been spurned.

For, all the passionate strain he sung,
The lyric line, the echoing ode,
Upon insensate ears has rung,
And round unanswering hearts has flowed.

Forth for the plaudit all a-flush
His whole soul leaned—and not a cry
Gave him acclaim. Into that hush
What should he do but sink and die!

That awful hush, where dreams, inspired,
A chord of voices heard instead,
Voices of those his soul desired
As starving children long for bread.

And, fair illusive folly, too,
Fame spread her wings of rainbowed gauze—
Now silence where her trumpet blew,
And darkness where her dazzle was.

An instrument of sweetest sound
Where all Æolian murmurs swim,
Tune under tune in subtlest round—
How had the world entreated him!

A sacred anger beads his brow,
And of a sudden stays his breath;
Since all the world rejects them, now
His songs shall have a glorious death!

Along the streets with heedless haste
He strides to find his dingy room,
No more the midnight oil to waste—
A greater flame shall light its gloom!

With trembling hands he tears the leaves
And scatters them about the hearth,
A wasting sob his bosom heaves,
He laughs with half-demoniac mirth.

There lie they, darlings of his life,
His life of six-and-twenty years;
In them what swift triumphant strife,
In them what thrills and joyous tears!

This line—the day it came, a flood
Of rosy light o'erflowed his brain;
And that—so swelled the bubbling blood
His heart ached with delicious pain.

Sheet after sheet, and leaf on leaf—
The night is cold, the night is dark,
The night consorts with such a grief;
Now haste, and fetch the kindling spark!

Ah, what a billowy flame is that
Leaps up the chimney in its flight,
Was ever fire such lustre gat
To squander on the outer night!

What colors flash along the blaze
That spreads its wings, and soars and dips!
So burns, long soaked in salty sprays,
Driftwood of wrecked and stranded ships.

Now curls the precious manuscript
Of Music on the Grecian Stage,
And none the sweetness that it dripped
Shall know, to the remotest age.

What light it casts about the place!
How paints upon the eager eye
The festal throng, the sandy space,
The sounding sea, the azure sky!

While monstrous shadows steal in groups—
Medea's dagger in her eyes,
Electra, broken-hearted, droops,
Orestes from his Furies flies.

It shrivels in a blackening scroll;
Gone those great shadows half divine,
But still on the reluctant coal
The swarming sparks re-write the line.

Another to the fire he flings;
He listens, and his face is wan—
For him, as for the Spanish Kings,
Tolls the great Bell of Arragon!

At last, at last, let glory burst
From one sole page athwart the gloom
That drinks it as a thing athirst
And blossoms into morning bloom!

While all the thronging “Passions” troop,
As once before they hurrying came,
And for a flashing moment stoop
Emblazoned on the ruddy flame:

Pale Melancholy, paler Fear,
And Anger with his secret stings,
Sport brandishing his beechen spear,
Love shaking odors from his wings.

They pass; they fade; his life fades, too,
Hope waves no more her golden hair;
One only of the wondrous crew
Lingers, in ashes—'tis Despair.

But splendid was the fire that roared,
And full the woes and wild distress
About it in libation poured,
Lees of the wine of bitterness!

Surely no altar ever raised
The smoke of sacrificial loads
With loftier, sadder fires than blazed
That night when Collins burned his odes!