# Studies in Song/Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor

The Song is preceded by a Dedication, in verse, To Mrs. Lynn Linton and is followed by a series of Notes. These relate to specific stanzas and are linked to via the stanza number.
SONG FOR THE CENTENARY
OF
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Born January 30th, 1775 Died September 17th, 1864
There is delight in singing, though none hear Beside the singer: and there is delight In praising, though the praiser sit alone And see the praised far off him, far above.
Landor.
DEDICATION.
TO MRS. LYNN LINTON.
Daughter in spirit elect and consecrate By love and reverence of the Olympian sire Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great, And found so gracious toward my long desire To bid that love in song before his gate Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre, To none save one it now may dedicate Song's new burnt-offering on a century's pyre. And though the gift be light As ashes in men's sight, Left by the flame of no ethereal fire, Yet, for his worthier sake Than words are worthless, take This wreath of words ere yet their hour expire: So, haply, from some heaven above, He, seeing, may set next yours my sacrifice of love.
May 24, 1880.
SONG FOR THE CENTENARY OF WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
I.
Their winters, white as faith's and age's hue, Melt, smiling through brief tears that broke between, And hope's young conquering colours reared anew, Since, on the day whose edge for kings made keen Smote sharper once than ever storm-wind blew, A head predestined for the girdling green: That laughs at lightning all the seasons through, Nor frost or change can sunder Its crown untouched of thunder
Leaf from least leaf of all its leaves that grew Alone for brows too bold For storm to sear of old, Elect to shine in time's eternal view, Rose on the verge of radiant life Between the winds and sunbeams mingling love with
strife.
2.
To Milton's white republic undefiled That might endure so few fleet years on earth Bore in him likewise as divine a child; But born not less for crowns of love and mirth, Of palm and myrtle passionate and mild, The leaf that girds about with gentler girth The brow steel-bound in battle, and the wild
Soft spray that flowers above The flower-soft hair of love; And the white lips of wayworn winter smiled And grew serene as spring's When with stretched clouds like wings Or wings like drift of snow-clouds massed and piled The godlike giant, softening, spread A shadow of stormy shelter round the new-born head.
3.
And touched his tongue with honey and with fire, And breathed between his lips the note of power That makes of all the winds of heaven a lyre Whose strings are stretched from topmost peaks that
tower
To softest springs of waters that suspire, With sounds too dim to shake the lowliest flower Breathless with hope and dauntless with desire: And bright before his face That Hour became a Grace, As in the light of their Athenian quire When the Hours before the sun And Graces were made one, Called by sweet Love down from the aerial gyre By one dear name of natural joy, To bear on her bright breast from heaven a heaven-born
boy.
4.
Or love could lift them for the sun to smite, His fiery birth-star as a sign of wonder Had risen, perplexing the presageful night
With shadow and glory around her sphere and under And portents prophesying by sound and sight; And half the sound was song and half was thunder, And half his life of lightning, half of light: And in the soft clenched hand Shone like a burning brand A shadowy sword for swordless fields of fight, Wrought only for such lord As so may wield the sword That all things ill be put to fear and flight Even at the flash and sweep and gleam Of one swift stroke beheld but in a shuddering dream.
5.
The sword of song shines as the swordsman sings;
From the west wind's verge even to the arduous east's The splendour of the shadow that it flings Makes fire and storm in heaven above the feasts Of men fulfilled with food of evil things; Strikes dumb the lying and hungering lips of priests, Smites dead the slaying and ravening hands of kings Turns dark the lamp's hot light, And turns the darkness bright As with the shadow of dawn's reverberate wings; And far before its way Heaven, yearning toward the day, Shines with its thunder and round its lightning rings; And never hand yet earlier played With that keen sword whose hilt is cloud, and fire its
blade.
6.
More soft than slumber's, fell the first note's sound From strings the swift young hand strayed lightlier through Than leaves through calm air wheeling toward the ground Stray down the drifting wind when skies are blue Nor yet the wings of latter winds unbound, Ere winter loosen all the Æolian crew With storm unleashed behind them like a hound. As lightly rose and sank Beside a green-flowered bank The clear first notes his burning boyhood found To sing her sacred praise Who rode her city's ways Clothed with bright hair and with high purpose crowned;
A song of soft presageful breath, Prefiguring all his love and faith in life and death.
7.
More than all else for ever: even the glory Of goodly beauty in women, whence all days Take light whereby death's self seems transitory; And loftier love than loveliest eyes can raise, Love that wipes off the miry stains and gory From Time's worn feet, besmirched on bloodred ways, And lightens with his light the night of story; Love that lifts up from dust Life, and makes darkness just, And purges as with fire of purgatory
The dense disastrous air, To burn old falsehood bare And give the wind its ashes heaped and hoary; Love, that with eyes of ageless youth Sees on the breast of Freedom borne her nursling Truth.
8.
That flamed upon it as one fiery star; Freedom, whose light makes pale the mounting sun, And Song, whose fires are quenched when Freedom's are. Of all that love not liberty let none Love her that fills our lips with fire from far To mix with winds and seas in unison And sound athwart life's tideless harbour-bar
Out where our songs fly free Across time's bounded sea A boundless flight beyond the dim sun's car, Till all the spheres of night Chime concord round their flight Too loud for blasts of warring change to mar, From stars that sang for Homer's birth To these that gave our Landor welcome back from earth.
9.
Stars of our worship, lights of our desire! For never man that heard the world's wind rave To you was truer in trust of heart and lyre: Nor Greece nor England on a brow more brave Beheld your flame against the wind burn higher:
Nor all the gusts that blanch life's worldly wave With surf and surge could quench its flawless fire: No blast of all that blow Might bid the torch burn low That lightens on us yet as o'er his pyre, Indomitable of storm, That now no flaws deform Nor thwart winds baffle ere it all aspire, One light of godlike breath and flame, To write on heaven with man's most glorious names his name.
10.
And freaked with fire as when God's hand would mar Palaces reared of tyrants, and the blue Deep heaven was kindled round her thunderous car,
That saw how swift a gathering glory grew About him risen, ere clouds could blind or bar A splendour strong to burn and burst them through And mix in one sheer light things near and far. First flew before his path Light shafts of love and wrath, But winged and edged as elder warriors' are; Then rose a light that showed Across the midsea road From radiant Calpe to revealed Masar The way of war and love and fate Between the goals of fear and fortune, hope and hate.
11.
Their nursing-mother France, the well-beloved,
By the arduous blast of sanguine sunrise fanned, Flamed on him, and his burning lips were moved As that live statue's throned on Lybian sand When morning moves it, ere her light faith roved From promise, and her tyrant's poisonous hand Fed hope with Corsic honey till she proved More deadly than despair And falser even than fair, Though fairer than all elder hopes removed As landmarks by the crime Of inundating time; Light faith by grief too loud too long reproved: For even as in some darkling dance Wronged love changed hands with hate, and turned his
heart from France.
12.
Love stronger-winged held more prevailing flight That o'er Tyrrhene, Iberian, and Ægean Shores lightened with one storm of sound and light. From earliest even to hoariest years one pæan Rang rapture through the fluctuant roar of fight, From Nestor's tongue in accents Achillean On death's blind verge dominant over night For voice as hand and hand As voice for one fair land Rose radiant, smote sonorous, past the height Where darkling pines enrobe The steel-cold Lake of Gaube, Deep as dark death and keen as death to smite,
To where on peak or moor or plain His heart and song and sword were one to strike for Spain.
13.
Pale in the light of war or treacherous fate Song bade before him all their shadows stand For whom his will unbarred their funeral grate. The father by whose wrong revenged his land Was given for sword and fire to desolate Rose fire-encircled as a burning brand, Great as the woes he wrought and bore were great. Fair as she smiled and died, Death's crowned and breathless bride Smiled as one living even on craft and hate:
And pity, a star unrisen, Scarce lit Ferrante's prison Ere night unnatural closed the natural gate That gave their life and love and light To those fair eyes despoiled by fratricide of sight.
14.
In perfect notes of music-measured pain On veiled sweet heads that heard not love's farewell Sob through the song that bade them rise again; Rise in the light of living song, to dwell With memories crowned of memory: so the strain Made soft as heaven the stream that girdles hell And sweet the darkness of the breathless plain, And with Elysian flowers
Recrowned the wreathless hours That mused and mourned upon their works in vain; For all their works of death Song filled with light and breath, And listening grief relaxed her lightening chain; For sweet as all the wide sweet south She found the song like honey from the lion's mouth.
15.
Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears That the everlasting sun of all time sees All golden, molten from the forge of years, Smiled, as the gift was laid upon his knees Of songs that hang like pearls in mourners' ears, Mild as the murmuring of Hymettian bees
And honied as their harvest, that endears The toil of flowery days; And smiling perfect praise Hailed his one brother mateless else of peers: Whom we that hear not him For length of date grown dim Hear, and the heart grows glad of grief that hears; And harshest heights of sorrowing hours, Like snows of Alpine April, melt from tears to flowers.
16.
The darkness was not, nor the temporal tomb: And multitudinous time for him was one, Who bade before his equal seat of doom Rise and stand up for judgment in the sun
The weavers of the world's large-historied loom, By their own works of light or darkness done Clothed round with light or girt about with gloom. In speech of purer gold Than even they spake of old He bade the breath of Sidney's lips relume The fire of thought and love That made his bright life move Through fair brief seasons of benignant bloom To blameless music ever, strong As death and sweet as death-annihilating song.
17.
Love gave his thought strength equal to release From bonds of old forgetful years, like foam
Vanished, the fame of memories that decrease; So strongly faith had fledged for flight from home The soul's large pinions till her strife should cease: And through the trumpet of a child of Rome Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece. As though some northern hand Reft from the Latin land A spoil more costly than the Colchian fleece To clothe with golden sound Of old joy newly found And rapture as of penetrating peace The naked north-wind's cloudiest clime, And give its darkness light of the old Sicilian time.
18.
Fade, and the darkness at Œnone's prayer
Close upon her that closed upon her boy, For all the curse of godhead that she bare; And the Apollonian serpent gleam and toy With scathless maiden limbs and shuddering hair; And his love smitten in their dawn of joy Leave Pan the pine-leaf of her change to wear; And one in flowery coils Caught as in fiery toils Smite Calydon with mourning unaware; And where her low turf shrine Showed Modesty divine The fairest mother's daughter far more fair Hide on her breast the heavenly shame That kindled once with love should kindle Troy with flame.
19.
With graver glories girt his godlike head, Reverted alway from the temporal throng Of lives that live not toward the living dead. The shadows and the splendours of their throng Made bright and dark about his board and bed The lines of life and vision, sweet or strong With sound of lutes or trumpets blown, that led Forth of the ghostly gate Opening in spite of fate Shapes of majestic or tumultuous tread, Divine and direful things, These foul as priests or kings, Those fair as heaven or love or freedom, red
With blood and green with palms and white With raiment woven of deeds divine and words of light.
20.
That keeps the place of Phocion's name serene And clears the cloud from Kosciusko's day, Alternate as dark hours with bright between, Met in the heaven of his high thought, which lay For all stars open that all eyes had seen Rise on the night or twilight of the way Where feet of human hopes and fears had been. Again the sovereign word On Milton's lips was heard Living: again the tender three days' queen
Drew bright and gentle breath On the sharp edge of death: And, staged again to show of mortal scene, Tiberius, ere his name grew dire, Wept, stainless yet of empire, tears of blood and fire.
21.
The fervour of his Apollonian eye Yearned upon Hellas, yet enthralled in bond Of time whose years beheld her and past by Silent and shameful, till she rose and donned The casque again of Pallas; for her cry Forth of the past and future, depths beyond This where the present and its tyrants lie, As one great voice of twain
For him had pealed again, Heard but of hearts high as her own was high, High as her own and his And pure as love's heart is, That lives though hope at once and memory die: And with her breath his clarion's blast Was filled as cloud with fire or future souls with past.
22.
Leaps to the lifting breeze that bids it leap, Large-hearted, and its thickening mane be thinned By the strong god's breath moving on the deep From utmost Atlas even to extremest Ind That shakes the plain where no men sow nor reap, So, moved with wrath toward men that ruled and sinned
And pity toward all tears he saw men weep, Arose to take man's part His loving lion heart, Kind as the sun's that has in charge to keep Earth and the seed thereof Safe in his lordly love, Strong as sheer truth and soft as very sleep; The mightiest heart since Milton's leapt, The gentlest since the gentlest heart of Shakespeare slept.
23.
His song arose on Corinth, and aloud Recalled her Isthmian song and strife when she Was thronged with glories as with gods in crowd
And as the wind's own spirit her breath was free And as the heaven's own heart her soul was proud, But freer and prouder stood no son than he Of all she bare before her heart was bowed; None higher than he who heard Medea's keen last word Transpierce her traitor, and like a rushing cloud That sundering shows a star Saw pass her thunderous car And a face whiter and deadlier than a shroud That lightened from it, and the brand Of tender blood that falling seared his suppliant hand.
24.
More glorious than all births of days and nights,
He bade the spirit of man regenerate, Rekindling, rise and reassume the rights That in high seasons of his old estate Clothed him and armed with majesties and mights Heroic, when the times and hearts were great And in the depths of ages rose the heights Radiant of high deeds done And souls that matched the sun For splendour with the lightnings of their lights Whence even their uttered names Burn like the strong twin flames Of song that shakes a throne and steel that smites; As on Thermopylæ when shone Leonidas, on Syracuse Timoleon.
25.
With smiles and tears and kisses bids them breathe, Fell with its music from his quiring string Fragrance of pine-leaves and odorous heath Twined round the lute whereto he sighed to sing Of the oak that screened and showed its maid beneath, Who seeing her bee crawl back with broken wing Faded, a fairer flower than all her wreath, And paler, though her oak Stood scathless of the stroke More sharp than edge of axe or wolfish teeth, That mixed with mortals dead Her own half heavenly head And life incorporate with a sylvan sheath, And left the wild rose and the dove A secret place and sacred from all guests but Love.
26.
Dividing pain from peace and man from shade He saw the wings that there no longer quiver Sink of the hours whose parting footfalls fade On ears which hear the rustling amaranth shiver With sweeter sound of wind than ever made Music on earth: departing, they deliver The soul that shame or wrath or sorrow swayed; And round the king of men Clash the clear arms again, Clear of all soil and bright as laurel braid, That rang less high for joy Through the gates fallen of Troy Than here to hail the sacrificial maid,
Iphigeneia, when the ford Fast-flowing of sorrows brought her father and their lord.
27.
He saw light glimmering through the grave green gloom That hardly gave the sun's eye leave to see Cymodameia; but nor tower nor tomb, No tower on earth, no tomb of waves may be, That may not sometime by diviner doom Be plain and pervious to the poet; he Bids time stand back from him and fate make room For passage of his feet, Strong as their own are fleet, And yield the prey no years may reassume
Through all their clamorous track, Nor night nor day win back Nor give to darkness what his eyes illume And his lips bless for ever: he Knows what earth knows not, sings truth sung not of the sea.
28.
More sacred than the Roman, rose and stood To take their several doom the imperial pair Diversely born of Venus, and in mood Diverse as their one mother, and as fair, Though like two stars contrasted, and as good, Though different as dark eyes from golden hair; One as that iron planet red like blood That bears among the stars Fierce witness of her Mars
In bitter fire by her sweet light subdued; One, in the gentler skies Sweet as her amorous eyes: One proud of worlds and seas and darkness rude Composed and conquered; one content With lightnings from loved eyes of lovers lightly sent.
29.
Radiant, by many a rushy and rippling cove More known to glance of god than wandering man, He sang the strife of strengths divine that strove, Unequal, one with other, for a span, Who should be friends for ever in heaven above And here on pastoral earth: Arcadian Pan,
And the awless lord of kings and shepherds, Love: All the sweet strife and strange With fervid counterchange Till one fierce wail through many a glade and grove Rang, and its breath made shiver The reeds of many a river, And the warm airs waxed wintry that it clove, Keen-edged as ice-retempered brand; Nor might god's hurt find healing save of godlike hand.
30.
Like earthquake felt in heaven, so dire a cry, So fearful and so fierce—'Give the sword scope!'— Rang from a daughter's lips, darkening the sky
To the extreme azure of all its cloudless cope With starless horror: nor the God's own eye Whose doom bade smite, whose ordinance bade hope, Might well endure to see the adulteress die, The husband-slayer fordone By swordstroke of her son, Unutterable, unimaginable on high, On earth abhorrent, fell Beyond all scourge of hell, Yet righteous as redemption: Love stood nigh, Mute, sister-like, and closer clung Than all fierce forms of threatening coil and maddening tongue.
31.
He heard and saw and sang them. Once again
Might foot of man tread, eye of man behold Things unbeholden save of ancient men, Ways save by gods untrodden. In his hold The staff that stayed through some Ætnean glen The steps of the most highest, most awful-souled And mightiest-mouthed of singers, even as then Became a prophet's rod, A lyre on fire of God, Being still the staff of exile: yea, as when The voice poured forth on us Was even of Æschylus, And his one word great as the crying of ten, Crying in men's ears of wrath toward wrong, Of love toward right immortal, sanctified with song.
32.
Beheld, nor since hath man again beholden, Whom Dante seeing him saw not, nor the giver Of all gifts back to man by time withholden, Shakespeare—him too, whom sea-like ages sever, As waves divide men's eyes from lights upholden To landward, from our songs that find him never, Seeking, though memory fire and hope embolden— Him too this one song found, And raised at its sole sound Up from the dust of darkling dreams and olden Legends forlorn of breath, Up from the deeps of death, Ulysses: him whose name turns all songs golden, The wise divine strong soul, whom fate Could make no less than change and chance beheld him great.
33.
Before us, nor in judgment frail and rathe, Less constant or less loving or less just, But fruitful-ripe and full of tender faith, Holding all high and gentle names in trust Of time for honour; so his quickening breath Called from the darkness of their martyred dust Our sweet Saints Alice and Elizabeth, Revived and reinspired With speech from heavenward fired By love to say what Love the Archangel saith Only, nor may such word Save by such ears be heard As hear the tongues of angels after death
Descending on them like a dove Has taken all earthly sense of thought away but love.
34.
All generous names and loyal, and all wise, With all his heart in all its wayfarings He sought, and worshipped, seeing them with his eyes In very present glory, clothed with wings Of words and deeds and dreams immortal, rise Visible more than living slaves and kings, Audible more than actual vows and lies: These, with scorn's fieriest rod, These and the Lord their God, The Lord their likeness, tyrant of the skies
As they Lord Gods of earth, These with a rage of mirth He mocked and scourged and spat on, in such wise That none might stand before his rod, And these being slain the Spirit alone be lord or God.
35.
Loved Freedom better, of all who have loved her best, Than he who wrote that scripture of the sun Writ as with fire and light on heaven's own crest, Of all words heard on earth the noblest one That ever spake for souls and left them blest: Gladly we should rest ever, had we won Freedom: we have lost, and very gladly rest.
O poet hero, lord And father, we record Deep in the burning tablets of the breast Thankfully those divine And living words of thine For faith and comfort in our hearts imprest With strokes engraven past hurt of years And lines inured with fire of immemorial tears.
36.
Words worthy of more than pity or less than scorn? Who sing the golden garland woven of three, Thy daughters, Graces mightier than the morn, More godlike than the graven gods men see Made all but all immortal, human born
And heavenly natured? With the first came He, Led by the living hand, who left forlorn Life by his death, and time More by his life sublime Than by the lives of all whom all men mourn, And even for mourning praise Heaven, as for all those days These dead men's lives clothed round with glories worn By memory till all time lie dead, And higher than all behold the bay round Shakespeare's head.
37.
Came girt with Grecian gold the second Grace,
And verier daughter of his most perfect hours Than any of latter time or alien place Named, or with hair inwoven of English flowers Only, nor wearing on her statelier face The lordlier light of Athens. All the Powers That graced and guarded round that holiest race, That heavenliest and most high Time hath seen live and die, Poured all their power upon him to retrace The erased immortal roll Of Love's most sovereign scroll And Wisdom's warm from Freedom's wide embrace, The scroll that on Aspasia's knees Laid once made manifest the Olympian Pericles.
38.
Came laughing like Etrurian spring the third, With green Valdelsa's hill-flowers in her hair Deep-drenched with May-dews, in her voice the bird Whose voice hath night and morning in it; fair As the ambient gold of wall-flowers that engird The walls engirdling with a circling stair My sweet San Gimignano: nor a word Fell from her flowerlike mouth Not sweet with all the south; As though the dust shrined in Certaldo stirred And spake, as o'er it shone That bright Pentameron, And his own vines again and chestnuts heard Boccaccio: nor swift Elsa's chime Mixed not her golden babble with Petrarca's rhyme.
39.
Yet, and yet hides not from our following eyes With soft rose-laurels and low strawberry-leaves, Ternissa, sweet as April-coloured skies, Bowed like a flowering reed when May's wind heaves The reed-bed that the stream kisses and sighs, In love that shrinks and murmurs and believes What yet the wisest of the starriest wise Whom Greece might ever hear Speaks in the gentlest ear That ever heard love's lips philosophize With such deep-reasoning words As blossoms use and birds, Nor heeds Leontion lingering till they rise
Far off, in no wise over far, Beneath a heaven all amorous of its first-born star.
40.
Darkening the light of heaven, lightening the night, Rings, rages, flashes round what ravening pyre That makes time's face pale with its reflex light And leaves on earth, who seeing might scarce respire, A shadow of red remembrance? Right nor might Alternating wore ever shapes more dire Nor manifest in all men's awful sight In form and face that wore Heaven's light and likeness more Than these, or held suspense men's hearts at height
More fearful, since man first Slaked with man's blood his thirst, Than when Rome clashed with Hannibal in fight, Till tower on ruining tower was hurled Where Scipio stood, and Carthage was not in the world.
41.
Who carved their several praise in words of gold To bare the brows of conquerors and to brand, Made shelterless of laurels bought and sold For price of blood or incense, dust or sand, Triumph or terror. He that sought of old His father Ammon in a stranger's land, And shrank before the serpentining fold,
Stood in our seer's wide eye No higher than man most high, And lowest in heart when highest in hope to hold Fast as a scripture furled The scroll of all the world Sealed with his signet: nor the blind and bold First thief of empire, round whose head Swarmed carrion flies for bees, on flesh for violets fed.
42.
He saw the light of death, riotous and red, Flame round the bent brows of Semiramis Re-risen, and mightier, from the Assyrian dead,
Kindling, as dawn a frost-bound precipice, The steely snows of Russia, for the tread Of feet that felt before them crawl and hiss The snaky lines of blood violently shed. Like living creeping things That writhe but have no stings To scare adulterers from the imperial bed Bowed with its load of lust, Or chill the ravenous gusts That made her body a fire from heel to head; Or change her high bright spirit and clear, For all its mortal stains, from taint of fraud or fear.
43.
He saw the godhead in Vittoria's face
Shine soft on Buonarroti's, till he took, Albeit himself God, a more godlike grace, A strength more heavenly to confront and brook All ill things coiled about his worldly race, From the bright scripture of that present book Wherein his tired grand eyes got power to trace Comfort more sweet than youth, And hope whose child was truth, And love that brought forth sorrow for a space, Only that she might bear Joy: these things, written there, Made even his soul's high heaven a heavenlier place, Perused with eyes whose glory and glow Had in their fires the spirit of Michael Angelo.
44.
The fair fame wounded by the black priest's fang, Giovanna's, and washed off her blithe and bold Boy-bridegroom's blood, that seemed so long to hang On her fair hand, even till the stain of old Was cleansed with healing song, that after sang Sharp truth by sweetest singers' lips untold Of pale Beatrice, though her death-note rang From other strings divine Ere his rekindling line With yet more piteous and intolerant pang Pierced all men's hearts anew That heard her passion through Till fierce from throes of fiery pity sprang
Wrath, armed for chase of monstrous beasts, Strong to lay waste the kingdom of the seed of priests.
45.
And majesty of meanest men born free, That made with Luther's or with Hofer's birth The whole world worthier of the sun to see: The wealth of spirit among the snows, the dearth Wherein souls festered by the servile sea That saw the lowest of even crowned heads on earth Thronged round with worship in Parthenope. His hand bade Justice guide Her child Tyrannicide, Light winged by fire that brings the dawn to be;
And pierced with Tyrrel's dart Again the riotous heart That mocked at mercy's tongue and manhood's knee: And oped the cell where kinglike death Hung o'er her brows discrowned who bare Elizabeth.
46.
He bared the heart of Essex, twain and one, For the base heart that soiled the starry mind Stern, for the father in his child undone Soft as his own toward children, stamped and signed With their sweet image visibly set on As by God's hand, clear as his own designed The likeness radiant out of ages gone
That none may now destroy Of that high Roman boy Whom Julius and Cleopatra saw their son True-born of sovereign seed, Foredoomed even thence to bleed, The stately grace of bright Cæsarion, The head unbent, the heart unbowed, That not the shadow of death could make less clear and proud.
47.
At once by service and similitude, Service devout and worship emulous Of the same golden Muses once they wooed, The names and shades adored of all of us, The nurslings of the brave world's earlier brood,
Grown gods for us themselves: Theocritus First, and more dear Catullus, names bedewed With blessings bright like tears From the old memorial years, And loves and lovely laughters, every mood Sweet as the drops that fell Of their own oenomel From living lips to cheer the multitude That feeds on words divine, and grows More worthy, seeing their world reblossom like a rose.
48.
The silent music that no strange note jars, Crowned not with gentler hand the years that glory Crowned, but could hide not all the spiritual scars
Time writes on the inward strengths of warriors hoary With much long warfare, and with gradual bars Blindly pent in: but these, being transitory, Broke, and the power came back that passion mars: And at the lovely last Above all anguish past Before his own the sightless eyes like stars Arose that watched arise Like stars in other skies Above the strife of ships and hurtling cars The Dioscurian songs divine That lighten all the world with lightning of their line.
49.
The last of his Ulysses. Bright and wide
For him time's dark strait ways, like clouds that clung About the day-star, doubtful to divide, Waxed in his spiritual eyeshot, and his tongue Spake as his soul bore witness, that descried, Like those twin towering lights in darkness hung, Homer, and grey Laertes at his side Kingly as kings are none Beneath a later sun, And the sweet maiden ministering in pride To sovereign and to sage In their more sweet old age: These things he sang, himself as old, and died. And if death be not, if life be, As Homer and as Milton are in heaven is he.
50.
Was pure toward all high poets, all their kind And all bright words and all sweet works thereof; Strong like the sun, and like the sunlight kind; Heart that no fear but every grief might move Wherewith men's hearts were bound of powers that bind; The purest soul that ever proof could prove From taint of tortuous or of envious mind; Whose eyes elate and clear Nor shame nor ever fear But only pity or glorious wrath could blind; Name set for love apart, Held lifelong in my heart, Face like a father's toward my face inclined; No gilts like thine are mine to give, Who by thine own words only bid thee hail, and live.