And ah, we poets, I misdoubt, Are little more than thou!
We speak a lesson taught we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows.
Thou canst foreshape thy word;
The poet is not lord Of the next syllable may come With the returning pendulum;And what he plans to-day in song, To-morrow sings it in another tongue.
Where the last leaf fell from his bough, He knows not if a leaf shall grow, Where he sows he doth not reap, He reapeth where he did not sow;He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep To meet him on his waking way.
Vision will mate him not by law and vow:
Disguised in life's most hodden-grey, By the most beaten road of everyday She waits him, unsuspected and unknown.
The hardest pang whereon He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob's stone.
In the most iron crag his foot can tread A Dream may strew her bed, And suddenly his limbs entwine, And draw him down through rock as sea-nymphs might through brine.
But, unlike those feigned temptress-ladies who In guerdon of a night the lover slew, When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead!
And, though he cherisheth The babe most strangely born from out her death, Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, -It is not she!
Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray Before the first shafts of the sun's onslaught From gloom's black harness splinter, And Summer move on Winter With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon of the May;As gesture outstrips thought;
So, haply, toyer with ethereal strings!
Are thy blind repetitions of high things The murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings Reveal song's summer in the air;The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare, Yet is thought's harbinger.
These strains the way for thine own strains prepare;We feel the music moist upon this breeze, And hope the congregating poesies.
Sundered yet by thee from us Wait, with wild eyes luminous, All thy winged things that are to be;They flit against thee, Gate of Ivory!