Classic Poem

1

Not the sweet solitude which poets love
Of sylvan home, set on some sunny knoll,
By gently-flowing stream; or in some dell
Sequestered, with bird-voices welling song
At morn and eve; where from the peering eyes
Of men shut off, and roar of the great world,
Year after year, uninterruptedly,
Works the rapt bard at his allotted task;
Not this sweet solitude, though much desired,
Not this sweet isolation has been mine:
But, up till now, ocean in sun and storm,
Where sometimes proudly speeds the ship, sometimes
Stands struggling for her life with the fierce gale,
While waves bestride her decks, and round her sing,
Like furies in their flight, the frenzied winds:
Not constancy of the oak, rooted in one spot,
But change kaleidoscopic, broken bits
Of life in foreign lands, these have been mine:
My home the round earth and the world of men.

2

Yet loves my soul this life: for through me runs —
Though grown less masterful in its long detour
Down urban generations, of the sail
And oar and helm forgetful — a viking vein,
A passion for the world-encircling wave,
From some Norse sire, whose galley was his home,
Some rider of the deep blue water drawn,
Blue-eyed, flavicomous; and within me lives,
Like sea-bird caged within a city room,
A secret wildness that will not be tamed,
An instinct from the Baltic and the Fiords.

3

Thus double-natured, loving diverse lives,
Man halts: God in his wisdom sets the task.

4

But who, ye Muses, who that hath beheld
Your shapes celestial, and your eerie song
Heard, that divine enthrallment hath escaped
Which visits those who on your beauty gaze?
Like is that man to one of Bacchus' slaves
Who once hath tasted Helicon's bright draught
In dreams he hears the circling sisters sing,
And seeks to re-enter that divine abode
The nympholepsy of the seer o'ertakes him:
Seizures henceforth, weird trances are his doom.
Not in this world, but in that mystic other,
His spirit — oft returning — finds its joy
As pale Chinese, or Hindoo haggard-faced,
Each in his drug surcease of sorrow seeks,
Poppy or hasheesh, so the poet, dazed
By voices sweet from the empyreal air,
Leaves all things for the Muses' magic cup.