Classic Poem

Say , guardian goddesses of woods,
Aspects; felt in solitudes,
And Memory, at whose blessed knee
The Nine, which thy dear daughters be,
Learnt of the majestic past;
And thou, that in some antre vast
Leaning afar off dost lie,
Otiose Eternity,
Keeping the tablets and decrees
Of Jove, and the ephemerides
Of the gods, and calendars
Of the ever festal stars;
Say, who was he, the sunless shade,
After whose pattern man was made;
He first, the full of ages, born
With the old pale polar morn,
Sole, yet all; first visible thought,
After which the Deity wrought?
Twin-birth with Pallas, not remain
Doth he in Jove's o'ershadowed brain
But though of wide communion,
Dwells apart, like one alone,
And fills the wondering embrace
(Doubt it not) of size and place.
Whether, companion of the stars,
With their tenfold round he errs;
Or inhabits with his lone
Nature in the neighbouring moon;
Or sits with body-waiting souls,
Dozing by the Lethæan pools:—
Or whether, haply placed afar
In some blank region of our star,
He stalks, an unsubstantial heap,
Humanity's giant archetype;
Where a loftier bulk he rears
Than Atlas, grappler of the stars,
And through their shadow-touched abodes
Brings a terror to the gods.
Not the seer of him had sight,
Who found in darkness depths of light;
His travelled eyeballs saw him not
In all his mighty gulphs of thought:—
Him the farthest-footed god,
Pleiad Mercury, never showed
To any poet's wisest sight
In the silence of the night:—
News of him the Assyrian priest
Found not in his sacred list,
Though he traced back old king Nine,
And Belus, elder name divine,
And Osiris, endless famed.
Not the glory, triple-named
Thrice great Hermes, though his eyes
Read the shapes of all the skies,
Left him in his sacred verse
Revealed to Nature's worshippers

O Plato! and was this a dream
Of thine in bowery Academe?
Wert thou the golden tongue to tell
First of this high miracle,
And charm him to thy schools below?
O call thy poets back, if so:
Back to the state thine exiles call,
Thou greatest fabler of them all;
Or follow through the self-same gate,
Thou, the founder of the state.