May-Day | Page 4

beach break,?The artful Air doth separate?Note by note all sounds that grate,?Smothering in her ample breast?All but godlike words,?Reporting to the happy ear?Only purified accords.?Strangely wrought from barking waves,?Soft music daunts the Indian braves,--?Convent-chanting which the child?Hears pealing from the panther's cave?And the impenetrable wild.
One musician is sure,?His wisdom will not fail,?He has not tasted wine impure,?Nor bent to passion frail.?Age cannot cloud his memory,?Nor grief untune his voice,?Ranging down the ruled scale?From tone of joy to inward wail,?Tempering the pitch of all?In his windy cave.?He all the fables knows,?And in their causes tells,--?Knows Nature's rarest moods,?Ever on her secret broods.?The Muse of men is coy,?Oft courted will not come;?In palaces and market squares?Entreated, she is dumb;?But my minstrel knows and tells?The counsel of the gods,?Knows of Holy Book the spells,?Knows the law of Night and Day,?And the heart of girl and boy,?The tragic and the gay,?And what is writ on Table Round?Of Arthur and his peers,?What sea and land discoursing say?In sidereal years.?He renders all his lore?In numbers wild as dreams,?Modulating all extremes,--?What the spangled meadow saith?To the children who have faith;?Only to children children sing,?Only to youth will spring be spring.
Who is the Bard thus magnified??When did he sing, and where abide?
Chief of song where poets feast?Is the wind-harp which thou seest?In the casement at my side.
AEolian harp,?How strangely wise thy strain!?Gay for youth, gay for youth,?(Sweet is art, but sweeter truth,)?In the hall at summer eve?Fate and Beauty skilled to weave.?From the eager opening strings?Rung loud and bold the song.?Who but loved the wind-harp's note??How should not the poet doat?On its mystic tongue,?With its primeval memory,?Reporting what old minstrels said?Of Merlin locked the harp within,--?Merlin paying the pain of sin,?Pent in a dungeon made of air,--?And some attain his voice to hear,?Words of pain and cries of fear,?But pillowed all on melody,?As fits the griefs of bards to be.?And what if that all-echoing shell,?Which thus the buried Past can tell,?Should rive the Future, and reveal?What his dread folds would fain conceal??It shares the secret of the earth,?And of the kinds that owe her birth.?Speaks not of self that mystic tone,?But of the Overgods alone:?It trembles to the cosmic breath,--?As it heareth, so it saith;?Obeying meek the primal Cause,?It is the tongue of mundane laws:?And this, at least, I dare affirm,?Since genius too has bound and term,?There is no bard in all the choir,?Not Homer's self, the poet sire,?Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,?Or Shakspeare, whom no mind can measure,?Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,?Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,?Scott, the delight of generous boys,?Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--?Not one of all can put in verse,?Or to this presence could rehearse,?The sights and voices ravishing?The boy knew on the hills in Spring,?When pacing through the oaks he heard?Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,?The heavy grouse's sudden whirr,?The rattle of the kingfisher;?Saw bonfires of the harlot flies?In the lowland, when day dies;?Or marked, benighted and forlorn,?The first far signal-fire of morn.?These syllables that Nature spoke,?And the thoughts that in him woke,?Can adequately utter none?Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.?And best can teach its Delphian chord?How Nature to the soul is moored,?If once again that silent string,?As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.
Not long ago, at eventide,?It seemed, so listening, at my side?A window rose, and, to say sooth,?I looked forth on the fields of youth:?I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,?I knew their forms in fancy weeds,?Long, long concealed by sundering fates,?Mates of my youth,--yet not my mates,?Stronger and bolder far than I,?With grace, with genius, well attired,?And then as now from far admired,?Followed with love?They knew not of,?With passion cold and shy.?O joy, for what recoveries rare!?Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,?See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom,--?Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!?Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoil?Of life resurgent from the soil?Wherein was dropped the mortal spoil.
Soft on the south-wind sleeps the haze!?So on thy broad mystic van?Lie the opal-coloured days,?And waft the miracle to man.?Soothsayer of the eldest gods,?Repairer of what harms betide,?Revealer of the inmost powers?Prometheus proffered, Jove denied;?Disclosing treasures more than true,?Or in what far to-morrow due;?Speaking by the tongues of flowers,?By the ten-tongued laurel speaking,?Singing by the oriole songs,?Heart of bird the man's heart seeking;?Whispering hints of treasure hid?Under Morn's unlifted lid,?Islands looming just beyond?The dim horizon's utmost bound;--?Who can, like thee, our rags upbraid,?Or taunt us with our hope decayed??Or who like thee persuade,?Making the splendour of the air,?The morn and sparkling dew, a snare??Or who resent?Thy genius, wiles, and blandishment?
There is no orator prevails?To beckon or persuade?Like thee the youth or maid:?Thy birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,?Thy blooms, thy kinds,?Thy echoes in the wilderness,?Soothe pain, and age, and love's distress,?Fire fainting will, and build heroic minds.
For thou, O Spring! canst renovate?All that high God did first create.?Be still his arm