Classic Poem

What comes with sound of stately trumpets pealing,
With flash of torches, flaring out the stars?
What majesty, what splendor slow revealing,
What mystery through the night's unfolding bars,
In gloom, cloud-multiform, delaying long,
Bursts into flower of flame and shower of song?

What march of multitudes in rhythmic motion,
What thunder of innumerable feet,
What mighty diapasons like the ocean,
Reverberating turbulently sweet
Through far dissolving silences, are blown
Worldward upon the wind's low monotone?

The mountains hear the warning and awaken,
In hushed processional issuing from the night,
Like Druid priests with mystic white robes shaken,
Communing in some immemorial rite:
Round their old brows burns what pale augury,
What benison, what ancient prophecy?

The sea has heard; through all its caverns under
Whither its giant broods have fled dismayed,
There goes a voice of wailing and of wonder:
“He comes, with gleaming spears and ranks arrayed,
And clang of chariot-wheels, and fire of spray;
We hear, we fear, we tremble and obey.”

The earth has heard it, and, arising, breathless,
Sets wide her doors and leans with beckoning palms
Over the quickening east: “Resistless, deathless
Father of worlds and lord of storms and calms,
Thou at whose will the seasons bloom and fail,
Dispenser and destroyer, hail, all hail!”

What are these prophecies and preludes golden,
Legends of light, and clarions that blow?
What is this secret of the skies, long holden
In star-girt solitudes, disclosing now?
'Tis manifest—'tis here; the doubt is done:
The day-heart leaps and throbs—behold the sun!