Classic Poem

While labouring thousands ply their task
And scarcely what it tends to ask,
While trembling thinkers on the brink
Pause sad and see not what to think,
Ere all believe that all is vain,
Come to express and to explain.
Come Thou, for whom all hearts are fain.

In faultless outline to portray
The substance of each shadowy day,
The deeds within us to rehearse
And give our meanings life in Verse,
To tell the purport of our pain
And what our silly joys contain,
Come Poet—for whom all hearts are fain.

Come, Poet, come! to give the dumb
A voice, to still vain talkers, come;
By hope allured, and caught by glare
Ten thousand dupes seek here and there;
While sages half have learnt to doubt,
And think we may be best without;
Come thou! for both but wait to see
Their error proved to them by thee.

Come Poet come, for but in vain
We do the work and feel the pain
And gather up the seeming gain
Unless while yet 'tis time, Thou come
And ere we lose it, tell their sum.

In vain I seem to call. And yet
Think not the living Times forget:
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer in the end might tell;
O'er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Doric fane at last;
And countless hearts on countless years
Had wasted wishes, hopes, and fears,
Rude laughters and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her Dome.
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvests that the dead have sown
(The dead, forgotten and unknown):