Poetry
You are a thought divine, O Poetry,
From the great father-heart derives your coming,
Your soul is power, your speech a melody,
Your smile life’s pain on earth too sweetly numbing.
Your garment is each wood where growth presides,
Red lava, mountain tops in clouds’ soft rustle,
The sea’s depths where Leviathan resides,
Even the largest cities’ endless hustle.
For you life’s bible never is shut tight,
Your home is every realm the earth advances,
The galaxy is traversed by your flight,
A diadem of stars your brow enhances!
Thus by each fervent mind you are perceived,
Both soul and thought your godliness intuit,
Each child within your heaven’s well-received,
Your godly treasure’s free for us to view it. –
Sometimes the world will glance up at your flight,
Although the world’s so much to occupy it,
And many a scholar tells of you aright
And teaches those keen learners to apply it –
Those few – just what the master meant and thought,
The endless body portioned out and rationed,
And see that poetry’s a thing well-wrought,
The poet zealous, one who crafts and fashions,
An educated man, one all can prize
Who honestly prepares the soup for dinner
Who skilfully a peach stone can excise
And split hairs like a jockey rides a winner,
Who states that ‘Poetry is light that’s shaped
From outside as a candle brightly gleaming,
But not some plant which, during night’s cold drape
And day’s hot fire, from inside starts its streaming.’
It does not falsely grow against a wall,
A plant whose shape by shears has been degraded,
But on its natural force can always call
and show that light streams from within unaided!
– When sun’s bright rays pass through a window pane,
A million grains of dust your eyes discover,
Though there’s no pollen that you thereby gain,
No, they’re just specks of dirt whose life’s soon over,
If blown on, only dust swirls like some thread,
Forms shapes and patterns, waves one can exult in,
But, day’s sun set, a product that is dead
Is what this frantic striving did result in.
The bard, Prometheus-like, stands on our coast,
With time’s great clock his heartbeats throb enchanted,
A world’s tears have his heaving breast as host.
Angelic flight to every thought’s been granted,
Leapfrog and making frills are both decried
And pretty tunes are something that he curses,
For then the muse would flee with one great sigh,
And his heart’s voice divine would cease its verses.
True poetry, if form’s constraints be cut,
Will mean that even prose can shine as brightly,
Prosaic thought though, form-bewitched, is but
Base metal that’s non-fireproof and unsightly.
Let rabble praise the finery they see,
The leaping and the pithy pirouetting
To find here Paul and Peter causes glee,
How, like the sun, they’re spotted at close vetting. –
No, up to heaven’s sun the proud muse flies,
She views both ocean desert and small river
The poet’s heart in violets she spies,
And every bird in hedgerow song aquiver.
She’s silent at her much-loved poet’s grave,
For he resides where she too has her dwelling;
But what he to the whole world freely gave
Now names him – for its voice came through his telling.
And spring by its hard battles makes us see
That life a passageway through death’s ice presses,
This was and will be so eternally,
The powerful spirit must tame forms’ excesses.
The sun’s rays in the sky to no extent
The flower’s lovely calyx ever fashion,
Nor can they ever fill it with fine scent,
No, from within comes all creative passion.
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