Theme

“What shall my song rehearse?” I saidTo a wise bard, whose hoary headIs bowed, like Kearsarge crouching lowBeneath a winter weight of snow,But whose songs of passion, joy, or scorn,Within a fiery heart are born.

“What can I spread, what proper feastFor these young Magi of the East?What wisdom find, what mystic lore,What chant they have not heard before?Strange words of old has every tongueThose happy cloistered hills among;For each riddle I divineThey can answer me with nine;Their footsteps by the Muse are led,Their lips on Plato’s honey fed;Their eyes have skill to read the pageOf Theban bard or Attic sage;For them all Nature’s mysteries,—The deep-down secrets of the seas,The cyclone’s whirl, the lightning’s shock,The language of the riven rock;They know the starry sisters seven,—What clouds the molten suns enfold,And all the golden woof of heavenUnravelled in their lens behold!Gazing in a thousand eyes,So rapt and clear, so wonder-wise,What shall my language picture, then,Beyond their wont—that has not reached their ken?

“What else are poets used to sing,Who sing of youth, than laurelled fame and love?But ah! it needs no words to moveYoung hearts to some impassioned vow,To whom already on the wingThe blind god hastens. Even nowTheir pulses quiver with a thrillThan all that wisdom wiser still.Nor any need to tell of rustling bays,Of honor ever at the victor’s hand,To them who at the portals standLike mettled steeds,—each eager from controlTo leap, and, where the corso lies ablaze,Let out his speed and soonest pass the goal.

“What is there left? what shall my verseWithin those ancient halls rehearse?”Deep in his heart my plaint the minstrel weighed,And a subtle answer made:“The world that is, the ways of men,Not yet are glassed within their ken.Their foster-mother holds them long,—Long, long to youth,—short, short to age, appearThe rounds of her Olympic Year,—Their ears are quickened for the trumpet-call.Sing to them one true song,Ere from the Happy Vale they turn,Of all the Abyssinian craved to learn,And dared his fate, and scaled the mountain-wallTo join the ranks without, and meet what might befall.”