Classic Poem

The sun is stepping upward in his might
To wake the West from sleep;
And, while his shining hair and brows of light
Lift like a giant's o'er the Western deep,
He fills with shadow every Eastern eye
Which saw him sink in bright obscurity —
In cloudy canopy of gold-like cloud.

The Mufti saw him sink, and cried aloud
To Allah and his seer,
Then straightway every Arab knee was bowed.
The Moor in the wide sand-wave struck his spear,
Gazed a mute prayer to Mecca and the shrine
Where sleeps the dust of Mahomet divine,
And slipt into the darkness of a dream.

The patient Hindoo caught his latest gleam
In penance for his caste,
Self-tortured by the ancient sacred stream.
The Parsee viewed the glory fading fast,
And wept his banishment from Khonzar's vale.
The Guebres sighed to see their god-head fail,
And felt the powers of darkness round them strong.

In distant China there was heard a song;
The mystery, and the doom
Of viewless ancestry employed it long
Where maids at shut of eve burnt sweet perfume.
The dreamer watched him fade into the West,
And sorrowed till his opiate wreathings blest
Wrought sleep in mystic palaces divine.

The Abyssinian saw the light decline,
And felt his amulet.
All ebon limbs grew cold beneath the line,
Though not a Libyan leaf with dew was wet.
The driver on his noiseless camel strove
To gain the desert fountain and the grove,
Ere howling monsters met him on the plain.

He sank from sight beyond the ancient main
Of Egypt, and the Nile.
The awful tombs of Djizeh gloomed again,
The Sphinx, unmoved, turned from his setting smile.
Then did the mourning women moot their sighs
In chambers of the East, and aching eyes
Bewept the dead who never could return.

Far Abyla and Calpe saw him burn
The ocean in his ire,
And, like a god indignant, from him spurn
The glorious sea-swell in a mist of fire.
Once more he looked, then plunged into the wave,
And left a myst'ry brooding on his grave,
And o'er the land a solemn darkness drew.

So Asia's flow'rs sloped to the West anew,
And closed their leaves in sleep.
So Afric's sons forgot their cursed hue,
So Europe's outposts lay in darkness deep.
Helvellyn saw the flaming light no more,
And sacred Snowdon hid his summits hoar
In domes of mist and vaults of sullen gloom.

And now he stands above the wat'ry doom,
And views our songless shores.
No sea-maid doth her glassy eyes illume
With fatal light, nor any siren pours
Her treacherous melody at ocean's brink.
No elf doth seek the cloud, no fairies shrink
Into their primrose tents of shady gold.

But, in the ancient woods the Indian old,
Unequal to the chase,
Sighs as he thinks of all the paths untold,
No longer trodden by his fleeting race.
And, Westward, on far-stretching prairies damp,
The savage shout, and mighty bison tramp
Roll thunder with the lifting mists of morn.