Classic Poem

Life , one by one, you sealed to me
Each room in this weird house of mine,
Sacred to love's glad sanctity,
Filled with youth's memories divine.

First you did seal those chambers glad
That opened on a garden wild,
When all the winds of heaven were mad
About the vague mind of the child.

Yea, ages now it seems ago,
I left the magic of those rooms,
Turning those ponderous hinges slow,
To deeper mysteries, stranger dooms.

Till time's grey corridors outgrew,
To marble sculpture, mighty glow
Of all earth's genius fretted through,
With earth's old tragedy of woe.

Then I traversed dim, ancient halls,
Ruins of time's rememberings,
That rusted on their mighty walls
The memories of a thousand kings.

Chaldea, Egypt, here looked down
From hideous heads and shadowed wings,
Till all the drowsed air seemed to drown
In sense of awful whisperings.

Athens, austere, of snowy dome
And frieze of marble, seemed to wait;
And all the eagled spears of Rome
Did clang their bronzed arms at the gate.

And then I went and left that past,
Dread vision of heads and columns and spears,
And awful hush and tumult vast
That haunt me down the haunting years.