Classic Poem

Blessed is leisure, gateway to the wonderful garden
Where the mind puts forth leaves
And the soul blossoms;
The machines, giant ifrits, should unlock those gates,
But they stand as dragons before them,
Destroying those who would enter.
They snatch their servers into slavery.
They crush the cunning hand and bastardize the soul.
Can a machine conceive beauty,
Or has a machine imagination?
Yet are they Ifrits that magically release
Many from labor and should release them
Into the growthful garden but, tools of the Masters,
Cruelly, they drive the released into the streets.
And Church and State cry " Stay not the birth-flow,
" Let babes be born into misery.
" We need serfs — we need soldiers. "
Each seed voyages down the Ages,
A winged messenger of Eternity;
From the polished chestnut, the wide-spreading chestnut tree,
And from the brown smoke of the puff-ball,
Dewy pearls on the morning path, through the pasture.
Amid the diamonds threaded on the gossamer
Hung by the lowly spiders, gleams the mind
Of the Infinite Designer.
The airy fabric of dreamers
Is from the same loom and will outlast
Towers of stone, bridges of iron.
The Imagination leaps from the uttermost depths
Of the sea to the high caravan of stars,
And rides upon the wings of Morning;
Having communion with the skies by day and by night;
And, like an invisible sylph,
Converses with trees and rivers,
Flowers and the reticent grasses.
It makes the soul one with those who wring
Their hands, weeping,
And one with the company who dance to gay music.
By Imagination, Man takes the hands
Of the gods who look afar,
Seeing the things which are not,
And the things which are not
Become more eternal than the things which are.