Classic Poem

We weary waiting for these glimmerings
Which struggle singly through the difficult rifts
Of aspiration from the overworld.
O for some breezy circumstance at once
To take the cloud off from our starry thoughts
And let their glory constellate the dark!
The spirit's brightest outgrowths are of pain,
As precious pearls are of disease in shells
At bottom of the deep. The slow, obscure,
Still process of the rain, distilling down
The great sweat of the sea, is never seen
In the consummate spectacle flashed forth
A seven-hued arch upon the cloud of heaven:
So never sees the world those energies,
Stern effort and long patience, which have stirred
In toil's humility and slowly heaved
Its darkness up, till sudden glory springs
Forth on it, showing like the spanning rainbow.
Think ye the lofty foreheads of the world,
Which shine as full moons through the night of time,
Holding their calm big splendor steadily
Forever at the top of history,
Think ye they rushed up with the suddenness
Of rockets aimlessly shot into heaven,
And flared to their eternal places there?
The vulgar years through which ambition gropes,
Reaching and feeling for its destiny,
Are only years of chaos, tallied not
On the memorial rocks, but covered deep
Under the stratified history of a world.
Celebrity by some great accident,
Some single opportunity, is like
Aladdin's palace in the Arabian tale,
Vanished when envy steals the wizard's charm.
But thought up-pyramids itself to fame
By husbandry of opportunities,
Grade upon grade constructing, till its hight,
Descried above time's far horizon, slopes
With peak among the stars. Go mummify
Thy name within that architectural pile
Another's intellect has builded; none—
For all the hieroglyphs of glory—none
Save but the builder's name shall signify
To the remembering ages.
Heart and brain
Of thine need resolutely yoke themselves
To slow-paced years of toil—need feel and think
(A bibulous memory sponging up the thoughts
Of dead men is not thought)—else all the trumps
Of hero-heraldry that ever twanged,
Gathered in one mad blare above the graves,
Shall not avail to resurrect thy name
To the salvation of remembrance then
When once the letters of it have slunk back
Into the alphabet from off thy tomb.
Ay, think or perish! Marble frets and crumbles
Down into undistinguishable dust
At last, and epitaphs grooved into brass
Yield piecemeal to the hungry elements;
But thoughts that drop plumb to the depths of truth
Anchor the name forever and forever.