Classic Poem

Through the tender amaranthine domes
Of angel-evenings echoing summer song,
Through the black rock-tombs
Of winter, and where autumn floods prolong
The midnight roar and tumbling thunder,
Through spring's daisy-peeping wonder,
Round and beyond and over and under,
I see our homes.

Bloom, healing rosiness and wild-wine flowers,
Or lift a vain wing in the mire, dropt leaf;
Storm-spirit, coil your lightnings round mad towers;
Go forth, you marching Seasons, horsemen Hours;
Blow silver triumphs, Joy, and knell, grey Grief.

These after-pieces will not now dispel
The scene and action that was learned in hell.
These charming veils a thought has strength to waft
With one quick thrill aloft; and then we view
Seasons and hours we better knew,
Desperate budding of untimely green,
Skies and soft cloud-land savagely serene,
Steel or mere sleet that beat past-caring bones,
Night-tempest not so loud as those long moans
From low-gorged lairs, which outshine Zion's towers,
Weak rags of walls, the forts of godlike powers.
We went, returned,
But came with that far country learned;
Strange stars, and dream-like sounds, changed speech and law are ours.

The Chinese tombs,
Some, squares of shrubby trees, some, peaks and mounds,
But more like tile-roofed huts and cottages,
Rise here and there among the fertile grounds.
The spring day blooms
Palely above them, and a warm tear falls
At moments from her opening eyes upon
Those hillocks and those walls;
The encircling wheat and beans as yet are wan,
With the dim stress of winter hardly gone;
The green corn waves
With the thin wind in its tall shroudage flowing,
Above those graves; the living labourer's hoeing
Ends at those graves.