Earlier Poems (1830-1836) | Page 8

songs,
Nor
deem that flattery's needless wile
My opening bosom wrongs;
For
who would trample, at my side,
A few pale buds, my garden's pride?
It may be that my scanty ore
Long years have washed away,
And
where were golden sands before
Is naught but common clay;
Still
something sparkles in the sun
For memory to look back upon.
And when my name no more is heard,
My lyre no more is known,

Still let me, like a winter's bird,
In silence and alone,
Fold over
them the weary wing
Once flashing through the dews of spring.
Yes, let my fancy fondly wrap
My youth in its decline,
And riot in
the rosy lap
Of thoughts that once were mine,
And give the worm
my little store
When the last reader reads no more!
POETRY:
A METRICAL ESSAY, READ BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA
SOCIETY,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, AUGUST, 1836
TO CHARLES WENTWORTH UPHAM, THE FOLLOWING
METRICAL ESSAY IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

This Academic Poem presents the simple and partial views of a young
person trained after the schools of classical English verse as
represented by Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell, with whose lines his
memory was early stocked. It will be observed that it deals chiefly with
the constructive side of the poet's function. That which makes him a
poet is not the power of writing melodious rhymes, it is not the
possession of ordinary human sensibilities nor even of both these
qualities in connection with each other. I should rather say, if I were
now called upon to define it, it is the power of transfiguring the
experiences and shows of life into an aspect which comes from his
imagination and kindles that of others. Emotion is its stimulus and
language furnishes its expression; but these are not all, as some might
infer was the doctrine of the poem before the reader.
A common mistake made by young persons who suppose themselves to
have the poetical gift is that their own spiritual exaltation finds a true
expression in the conventional phrases which are borrowed from the
voices of the singers whose inspiration they think they share.
Looking at this poem as an expression of some aspects of the /ars
poetica/, with some passages which I can read even at this mature
period of life without blushing for them, it may stand as the most
serious representation of my early efforts. Intended as it was for public
delivery, many of its paragraphs may betray the fact by their somewhat
rhetorical and sonorous character.
SCENES of my youth! awake its slumbering fire!
Ye winds of
Memory, sweep the silent lyre!
Ray of the past, if yet thou canst
appear,
Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year;
Chase
from her breast the thin autumnal snow,
If leaf or blossom still is
fresh below!
Long have I wandered; the returning tide
Brought back an exile to his
cradle's side;
And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled,
To greet
the land-breeze with its faded fold,
So, in remembrance of my
boyhood's time,
I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme;
Oh, more

than blest, that, all my wanderings through,
My anchor falls where
first my pennons flew!
. . . . . . . . .
The morning light, which rains its quivering beams
Wide o'er the
plains, the summits, and the streams,
In one broad blaze expands its
golden glow
On all that answers to its glance below;
Yet, changed
on earth, each far reflected ray
Braids with fresh hues the shining
brow of day;
Now, clothed in blushes by the painted flowers,

Tracks on their cheeks the rosy-fingered hours;
Now, lost in shades,
whose dark entangled leaves
Drip at the noontide from their pendent
eaves,
Fades into gloom, or gleams in light again
From every
dew-drop on the jewelled plain.
We, like the leaf, the summit, or the wave,
Reflect the light our
common nature gave,
But every sunbeam, falling from her throne,

Wears on our hearts some coloring of our own
Chilled in the slave,
and burning in the free,
Like the sealed cavern by the sparkling sea;

Lost, like the lightning in the sullen clod,
Or shedding radiance,
like the smiles of God;
Pure, pale in Virtue, as the star above,
Or
quivering roseate on the leaves of Love;
Glaring like noontide, where
it glows upon
Ambition's sands,--the desert in the sun,--
Or soft
suffusing o'er the varied scene
Life's common coloring,--intellectual
green.
Thus Heaven, repeating its material plan,
Arched over all the rainbow
mind of man;
But he who, blind to universal laws,
Sees but effects,
unconscious of their cause,--
Believes each image in itself is bright,

Not robed in drapery of reflected light,--
Is like the rustic who,
amidst his toil,
Has found some crystal in his meagre soil,
And, lost
in rapture, thinks for him alone
Earth worked her wonders on the
sparkling stone,
Nor dreams that Nature, with as nice a line,
Carved
countless angles through the boundless mine.

Thus err the many, who, entranced to find
Unwonted lustre in some
clearer mind,
Believe that Genius sets the laws at naught
Which
chain the pinions of our wildest thought;
Untaught to measure, with
the eye of art,
The wandering fancy