Classic Poem

Drums , you are too tame,
And reach not to the heart's heroic roots;
Nor you, accusing flutes,
Wailing an elegy of wasted life's
Soon shuttered breath;
Nor you, thin skeleton strings that plead with Death,
Drawing your sweetness from unearthly fields
Where silence yields
Her ear to sadness deeper than
Any that's heard in man's farewell to fugitive man.

Too tame are drums and strings,
Too shrill the funeral and fitful fifes.
It is you,
Loud trumpets, you
That break the ice-sealed springs;
Whose lifted clangour
For ever unsubdued
Awakes rebellion against Time's servitude.
The unmanning flutes,
The nervous, ghostly drums,
The strings that spread a subtle shaking snare,
Are all too tame.
Like the Sun's herald blaring his bronze notes,
Or Eastern Attila sweeping on the West
With myriad thundering throats,
Or proud Atlantic ship bringing swift day
To slavish shores and continents of night—
The trumpets' lifted clangour
Upheaves the light,
Unseals the primal blood, the lust and anger,
And slips that ancient hound, the Flesh—and hark!
The echoing bark,
The near, reiterated reply,
The hound's deep, hoarse, harsh cry.