No poet he who knows not the great joy
That pulses in the flow and rush of rhythm,-
Rhythm which is the seed and life of life,
And of all art the root, and branch, and bloom,—
Knows not the strength that comes when vibrant thought
Beats 'gainst the bounds of fixèd time and space;
For law unto the master is pure freedom,
The prison-house a garden of delight.
So doth the blown breath from the bugle's walls
Issue in most triumphant melody;
So doth the impassioned poet's perfect verse,
Confined in law eternal, mate the stars.
LET not thy listening spirit be abashed
By the majestic ranks of ancient bards
Or all the clarion singers of thy day:
For in thy true and individual song
Thou art a voice of nature; as the wind,
And cries of moving waters, and all shows
And speaking symbols of the universe
Are but the glorious sound and utterance
Of the mysterious power that spake the Word -
The immense first word that filled with splendid light
And vibrant potency the house of life;
Whose candles are a million, million stars,
Whose windows look on gulfs unthinkable
That bound our world. Think not on thine own self,
But on the enormous currents silently
That flood the unseen channels of still force,
Or with the sound of earthquake and the shout
Of circling storms complete an unknown doom.
Thine is the fate and function mystical,
In forms of lyric and eternal art,
Clearly to utter and re-syllable
The primal Word: - So is thy verse of kin
To the sea-shell, the lily, and the leaf.
It hath a natural right and majesty,
Being of the infinite, all-evolving power
True jet and symbol; kin to the morning star
That in the sky of dawn sings with its mates.
THE Angel of Life stood forth on the threshold of Birth
And converse held with a spirit about to be born;
And the Angel announced to the Soul awaiting its world:
Choose thou! for now thou must choose, and never here-
And if thou to beauty shalt bow, to Beauty and Art,
And if to thy spirit all exquisite things be revealed,
If the fate of the poet be thine, if a god thou wouldst be,
If thou in thy soul wouldst joyfully seize and encompass
The glories and grandeurs of earth, the sweetness supreme,
The vision angelic, forbidden to eyes unanointed,
The melodies silent to all save the holy of spirit,
The signs and the secrets, the splendors, the exaltations,
If these thou shalt choose, if these thou wouldst know
and impart,
Even so but forget not the price of the infinite wisdom,
For the price of the passion of joy is the passion of sorrow,
And the cost of thy heaven is the burning and anguish of
And only, only he:
Heaven in his heart hath burned it;
To him alone 't is free,
And them from him who learned it
In wise simplicity.
From thousand suns it flashes,
It leaps in flower and flame;
The spring, from winter's ashes,
Cries out its silent name
The secret of the ages
That, to the poet came.
Unknown to all the sages,
However wise they be,
Through his quick veins it rages
And soul of ecstasy;
It lightnings from his pages,
In all his songs 't is sung:
The secret of the ages
To be forever young.
"THE DAY BEGAN AS OTHER DAYS BEGIN"
THE day began as other days begin,
The round of work, the implacable city's din;
The New World's Babel, louder with each hour.
Then in a by-way,- a still, secret bower,-
A temple given to silence and to books;
And in its heart a sacred nook of nooks.
There, in the silence, from a priceless store
Of written tomes, a guardian of their lore
A manuscript uplifted to my view,
With reverent, loving hands—and then withdrew.
Opening the book my gaze fell on that line
Wherein the marvelous poet, the divine
Singer of Endymion, his deathless song
Began, and so beginning made immortal.
O dead, undying bard! now all the wrong Fate did thee rose; through Memory's draped portal Trooped, in wan figures, all thy tragic story— But mightier still the wonder and the glory. Of that white page whereon thy soul was poured. Then with thy spirit my spirit likewise soared; Something immortal entered in this breast Miraculously; and like one confessed
And throughly shriven, back to the world I turned While a new heart within me flamed and burned.
And yet that morn, when grew the glare and din, The day began, as other days begin.
WHAT, then, shall make these songs of mine more real; More tuneful, piercing, bright — miraculous,
As art should be? Shall some high, fortunate chant,
Some song to come, flood backward on them all,—
Over every word in all the singing flock,—
A light, a meaning; a power to seize, to thrill;
A swift beatitude and haunting beauty;
Shall make of them a trouble to the base,
Scourge to the false, sun to the darkened soul,
Help to the fainting, succor to the bruised,
A judgment to the heeding and unheeding?
Or shall a flame leap from the singer's flight,
Making them luminous in sudden dawn
Bright in the chrism of Death.
PRELUDE FOR "A BOOK OF MUSIC"
WITHOUT intent, I find a book I've writ
And music is the pleasant theme of it;
For tho' I can no music make, I trust
Here's proof I love it.
Tho' no reasoning fine
Should any ask to show this art divine,
Yet have I known even poets who refuse
To name pure music as an equal muse.
If music pleased them, 't was not deeply felt,
And in its charms they deemed it shame to melt;
For that, they held, it is an art where might
Even children give its votaries delight,
And therefore lacking in the things of mind.
But 't is not argued well. There is a kind
Of music that a little child can give,
Echoing great masters; but the masters live
Not in such echo-elfish, immature;
'Tis but a part of them. Ah, be ye sure
Tho' lovely, not the loveliest; that must wait
For him who noble moods can recreate
With solemn, subtile, and deep-thoughted art
That wins the mind or e'er it takes the heart.
For that a child may gracious music make
Is but a sign that music doth partake
Of something deep, primeval, that began
When God dreamed of Himself, and fashioned man.
'Tis near the source of being; it repeats
The vibrancy that runs in rhythmic beats
Through all the shaken universe; and tho'
Its language shall take not the ebb and flow
Of speech articulate, it is that tone
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