Classic Poem

A THWART the sod which is treading for God the Poet paced with his splendid eyes;
Paradise-verdure he stately passes to win to the Father of Paradise,
Through the conscious and palpitant grasses of intertangled relucent dyes.

The angels a-play on its fields of Summer (their wild wings rustled his guides' cymars)
Looked up from disport at the passing comer, as they pelted each other with handfuls of stars;
And the warden-spirits with startled feet rose, hand on sword, by their tethered cars.

With plumes night-tinctured englobed and cinctured of Saints, his guided steps held on
To where on the far crystalline pale of that transtellar Heaven there shone
The immutable crocean dawn effusing from the Father's Throne.

Through the reverberant Eden-ways the bruit of his great advent driven,
Back from the fulgent justle and press with mighty echoing so was given,
As when the surly thunder smites upon the clanged gates of Heaven.

Over the bickering gonfalons, far-ranged as for Tartarean wars,
Went a waver of ribbed fire — as night-seas on phosphoric bars
Like a flame-plumed-fan shake slowly out their ridgy reach of crumbling stars.

At length to where on His fretted Throne sat in the heart of His aged dominions
The great Triune, and Mary nigh, lit round with spears of their hauberked minions,
The Poet drew, in the thunderous blue involved dread of those mounted pinions.

As in a secret and tenebrous cloud the watcher from the disquiet earth
At momentary intervals beholds from its ragged rifts break forth
The flash of a golden perturbation, the travelling threat of a witched birth;

Till heavily parts a sinister chasm, a grisly jaw, whose verges soon,
Slowly and ominously filled by the on-coming plenilune,
Supportlessly congest with fire, and suddenly spit forth the moon: —

With beauty, not terror, through tangled error of night-dipt plumes so burned their charge;
Swayed and parted the globing clusters so, — — disclosed from their kindling marge,
Roseal-chapleted, splendent-vestured, the Poet there where God's light lay large.

Hu, hu! a wonder! a wonder! see, clasping the Poet's glories clings
A dingy creature, even to laughter cloaked and clad in patchwork things,
Shrinking close from the unused glows of the seraphs' versicoloured wings.

A Rhymer, rhyming a futile rhyme, he had crept for convoy through Eden-ways
Into the shade of the Poet's glory, darkened under his prevalent rays,
Fearfully hoping a distant welcome as a poor kinsman of his lays.

The angels laughed with a lovely scorning: — " Who has done this sorry deed in
The garden of our Father, God? 'mid his blossoms to sow this weed in?
Never our fingers knew this stuff: not so fashion the looms of Eden!"

The Poet bowed his brow majestic, searching that patchwork through and through,
Feeling God's lucent gazes traverse his singing-stoling and spirit too:
The hallowed harpers were fain to frown on the strange thing come 'mid their sacred crew.
Only the Poet that was earth his fellow-earth and his own self knew.

Then the Poet rent off robe and wreath, so as a sloughing serpent doth,
Laid them at the Rhymer's feet, shed down wreath and raiment both,
Stood in a dim and shamed stole, like the tattered wing of a musty moth.

(The Poet addresses his Maker)
" Thou gav'st the weed and wreath of song, the weed and wreath are solely Thine,
And this dishonest vesture is the only vesture that is mine;
The life I textured, Thou the song: — — my handicraft is not divine!"

(The Poet addresses the Rhymer)
He wrested o'er the Rhymer's head that garmenting which wrought him wrong;
A flickering tissue argentine down dripped its shivering silvers long: —
" Better thou wov'st thy woof of life than thou didst weave thy woof of song!"

Never a chief in Saintdom was, but turned him from the Poet then;
Never an eye looked mild on him 'mid all the angel myriads ten,
Save sinless Mary, and sinful Mary — the Mary titled Magdalen.

" Turn yon robe," spake Magdalen, " of torn bright song, and see and feel."
They turned the raiment, saw and felt what their turning did reveal —
All the inner surface piled with bloodied hairs, like hairs of steel.

" Take, I pray, yon chaplet up, thrown down ruddied from his head."
They took the roseal chaplet up, and they stood astonished:
Every leaf between their fingers, as they bruised it, burst and bled.

" See his torn flesh through those rents; see the punctures round his hair,
As if the chaplet-flowers had driven deep roots in to nourish there —
Lord, who gav'st him robe and wreath, what was this Thou gav'st for wear?"

" Fetch forth the Paradisal garb!" spake the Father, sweet and low;
Drew them both by the frightened hand where Mary's throne made irised bow —
" Take, Princess Mary, of thy good grace, two spirits greater than they know."