Classic Poem

I

I FOLLOWED thee, wild stream of Paradise,
White Usk, for ever showering the sunned bee
In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree;
And all along had magical surmise
Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies,
As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea,
Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly
The giant breakers form, and fall, and rise.

Above thy poet's dust, by yonder yew,
Ere distance perished, ere a star began,
His clear monastic measure, heard of few,
Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran;
And thou to me wert dear, because I knew
The God who made thee gracious, and the man.

II

I F , by that second lover's power controlled,
In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o'erfills
Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils,
From distance unto distance trailing gold;
If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold,
Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills
Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills
Diviner run thy shallows than of old; —

If intellectual these, Oh! name my Vaughan
Creator too: and close his memory keep
Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn
Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep;
A play of thought more mystic than the dawn,
And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.