Classic Poem

What emanation from the fertile mind,
Of all-creative genius is more fair,
Than thou art, Statue, beautiful and rare,
With the fine power of Plastic Art designed?

What dream of poet, in Elysian sleep
Reposing, images a lovelier sight
Than thou, thus standing in the marble light
Reflected from thee, soft, and pure, and deep?

Ah, holy is the air around thee thrown,
An effluence pious lips may call divine —
Rays as from plumes of angels melt and shine,
Yet human humbleness appears thine own.

Burdened with sorrow and subdued by shame,
Yet mantled by thy virtue thou art hid,
And each bold eye drops down a veiling lid
And sees no blot upon thy naked fame.

Put in the public market-place, a slave,
Alone and shelterless, without a friend —
Whither, oh whither do thy sad thoughts tend,
With none but Heaven to succor and to save!

To thy dear home in Hellas far away,
That home, so consecrate in ancient song,
But stained in modern years by deeds of wrong,
And quite oblivious of her glorious day.

Pygmalion prayed his statue into life,
But thou appear'st from life transform'd to stone,
As if the sculptor, pitying thy lone
Heart-breaking servitude and mental strife,

Had by that high command, which Genius gives,
Fixed thee forever in this stirless state;
Ransomed, redeemed and rescued from thy fate,
Thy speechless story thus embodied lives.

Lives with the grand creations of old time,
The Goddesses, Nymphs, Muses, Graces — all
Who still adorn Art's elevated hall,
Or with the stars unite their names sublime.

Though nameless thou, thy individual beam
Shall fall on future ages and make clear
Thy country's beauty, to our land as dear
As aught else mirrored on Time's flowing stream.

For Greece was Freedom's birth-place, and her sons
Were brave, as brave as were her daughters fair;
Though now no martial deeds her children dare,
Still through the race the blood of Venus runs.

And thou! true type of loveliness and wo,
Type of thy native land, which lowly lies,
Chained, yet how comely, under those blue skies,
That sweetly smile as they smiled long ago!