Classic Poem

Friend Whitman! wert thou less serene and kind,
Surely thou mightest (like our Bard sublime,
Scorn'd by a generation deaf and blind),
Make thine appeal to the avenger, Time;
For thou art none of those who upward climb,
Gathering roses with a vacant mind,
Ne'er have thy hands for jaded triflers twined
Sick flowers of rhetoric and weeds of rhyme.
Nay, thine hath been a Prophet's stormier fate.
While Lincoln and the martyr'd legions wait
In the yet widening blue of yonder sky,
On the great strand below them thou art seen, —
Blessing, with something Christ-like in thy mien,
A sea of turbulent lives that break and die!