Classic Poem

Dear heart, I shall not altogether die.
Something of my elusive scattered spirit
shall within the line's diaphanous urn
by Poetry be piously preserved.

I shall not altogether die; when stricken
I fall beneath the blows of human pain,
you will make haste and from the shadowy
battlefield raise up the dying brother.

It may be then, from the vanquished mouth,
mute and aspiring the infinite calm,
that to your ears will come the voice of all
that sleeps with open eyes within my soul.

Deep buried memories of fleeting days;
the solitary sighs of melancholy
tenderness; and pallid ailing joys
sobbing to the music of the viols.

All that the man hides fearfully away
will from the poet, vibrant, issue forth
in golden measures of secret orison
whose every period invokes your name.

And you will perhaps observe that in strange wise
my verses sound on your attentive ear,
and in the glass I sully with my breath
will contemplate the image of my thought.

Seeing then what I was wont to dream,
of my faltering poetry you will say:
gloomy and vulgar were his songs of old,
but this, now, how beautiful it was!

Because I shrine your memory in strains
of the living, sacred, universal quire;
because the gleam of unfamiliar tears
shines in the bitter chalice of my hymn;

because blest Poetry exists and you
in it irradiate, in that same verse
that holds a scattered atom of my being,
dear heart, I shall not altogether die!