Classic Poem

Now that you are a Song
And your life has come to an end
And you wholly belong
To the world of Art, my friend,
Take, for well it is due,
This tribute of my rhymes
With mind unswerved from you
In these enormous times;
Not that I wish to intrude
To mix with mine your leaf,
But that I would entwine
In your magnificent sheaf,
After sad interlude,
A spray cut from that fine
And rare plant, Gratitude.
For anything I owe
In the art of making songs
Largely to you is due,
To you the credit belongs
Who never stinted or spared
Yourself in the difficult feat
Of getting a man prepared
To sing in his own conceit.
None may carry a stone
To your high tower of thought
But surely I can own
Whose was the influence caught
Me in wild wear disguised
And undistinguished found me,
Encouraged, authorised
And with the laurel crowned me;
And make it lovingly clear
While memory is fresh
What manner of man you were
While here clothed on with flesh.
The world knows well your rhymes,
But I would depict you to please
The men in coming times
By a picture of you in these
And make them as grateful to me
As I would be could I find,
Searching past history,
Troubled Euripides
Or unvexed Sophocles,
By some contemporary mind.

II

The noble head held high,
The nose with an eagle's gaze,
The sharp appraising eye,
The brown unageing face,
The beautiful elegant hands
As white as the breasts of the love
Of Ossian in faerylands:
Among us but ever aloof,
He never hurried or ran,
With eyes on a lordly track
A tall upstanding man
You dared not slap on the back.
He moved in a diffident way
As if a new-comer to earth
Wrapped in a magical day
Older than death or than birth:
A man come down from the men
Who walked in the morning dew
Of dark Ferdia's strain
With lips like berries of yew:
A race that hosts in the hills,
A race few eyes can see,
A race that our day fills
With perverse, mischievous glee:
A head never turned by fame,
An eerie spirit that takes
Its preternatural calm
From sloe-black mountain lakes.
You heard the sound of his soul
Through words in their equipoise;
The sound of his soul was beautiful:
He had a most beautiful voice.

III

O brain that never lacked full power,
O spirit always of the tower
That never stooped to earthly lure
But at your height were self-secure:
With wistful child's benignity,
With Man's most noble dignity
You never compromised with fear
You brought the Brave among us here,
And high above the tinsel scene
Strode with the old heroic mien,
And equalled to your intellect
The grandeur of your self-respect.

IV

O happy were your days on earth
When we sat by the household hearth
And, as the Autumn glow went out,
Bandied the whole bright world about,
Making Reality betray
The edges of sincerer day;
Or in that orchard house of mine, —
The firelight glancing in the wine
Or on your ring that Dulac made —
How merrily your fancy played
With the lost egg that Leda laid,
The lost, third egg, Herodotos
In Sparta said he came across;
Or broached a problem more absurd:
In the Beginning was the Word,
Since there was none to hear, unheard?
Or linking stranger mysteries,
The Spring with dates of the decease
Of Caesar, Christ and Socrates,
You let imagination range
Into the fabulous and strange
Realms of the mind where, at its source,
Life is exultant and perverse.
Then presently you would recite
The verses you made overnight,
Affirming that a song should be
Bone-bare in its simplicity.
Exemplifying this, you chose
Before the Adonais, those
Straight lines of Burns on Captain Grose
" No, no! on Henderson, not Grose "
" For Matthew was a queer man " ;
Preferring the heartfelt, sincere,
Artless humanity of " queer "
To Shelley's cosmic sermon.
Sometimes you brought invective down
Upon the " blind and ignorant town "
Which I would half disclaim;
For in my laughing heart I knew
Its scheming and demeaning crew
Was useful as the opposite to
The mood that leads to fame;
For very helpful is the town
Where we by contradicting come
Much nearer to our native home;
But yet it made me grieve
To think its mounted-beggar race
Makes Dublin the most famous place
For famous men to leave:
Where City Fathers staged a farce
And honoured one who owned a horse;
They win right well our sneers
Who of their son took no account
Though he had Pegasus to mount
And rode two hemispheres.
Return Dean Swift, and elevate
Our townsmen to the equine state!

V

Now you are gone beyond the glow
As muted as a world of snow;
And I am left amid the scene
Where April comes new-drenched in green,
To watch the budding trees that grow
And cast, where quiet waters flow,
Their hueless patterns below;
And think upon the clear bright rill
That lulled your garden on the hill;
And wonder when shall I be made
Like you, beyond the stream, a shade.

VI

We might as well just save our breath,
There's not a good word to be said for Death
Except for the great change it brings:
For who could bear the loveliest Springs
Touched by the thought that he must keep
A watch eternal without sleep?
But yet within the ends
Of human, not eternal things,
We all resent the change it brings:
Chiefly the loss of friends:
Tyrrell, Mahaffy and Macran,
The last the gentlest gentleman,
And golden Russell — all were gone,
Still I could turn to you alone.
Now you have turned away
Into the land of sleep or dreams
(If dreams you rule them yet meseems).
With clowns in tragedy,
Here solitary, I, bereft
Of all impulse of praise, am left
Without authority or deft
Example in a rhyme.
There never was a poet yet
Could put another more in debt,
England's great-hearted Laureate
Is here to testify to that
As, more indebted, I
Whose hand you held, whose line you filled,
Whose mind with reverence instilled
For the most noble and august
Art that can shake men more than lust.
Here I must bide my time
And, through my loss, grow more content
To go the way the Master went
And follow on a friend
Praising the life by art imbued,
The Apollonian attitude
And lips that murmured metre till the end.