Classic Poem

Hellas victorious!
Two came to me at night
Glorious
With that Elysian light
Which round the phantoms of great Poets dead
Hovers, as once in their blue earthly eyes
Played Thoughts with wings outspread,—
The splendour of their souls.
Cried one to me, “O mortal brother, since thou lovest too
With all thy burning breath
The stony hills and salt Corinthian blue
From whose divine dear shore
Apollo led me to the caves of death——”

But charmèd, he forbore.
His voice had sung to measure grave and low
When suddenly his young friend-phantom spoke,
And Shelley's voice rang like a wave of æther
Blazing and breaking on rosy cliffs of air,
And his face was flaming snow, overlushed
By a river of the sun—his long bright hair.
“Inheritor,” he sang, “speed thou away
Rushing with Aeolus and Boreas, rushing on the ancient paths
Scattering the rosy plumage of the new arisen day.

“Go thou to Athens, go to Salonica,
Go thou to Yannina beside the lake,
And cry, ‘The vision of the Prophet dead!’
Cry, ‘The Olympians wake!’
And cry, ‘O Towers of Hellas built anew by rhyme,
Star-woven to my Amphionic lyre,
Stand you in steel for ever,
And from your lofty lanterns sweeping the dim hills and the nocturnal sea
Pour out the fire of Hellas, the everlasting fire!’”

And then to me once more the Elder Shadow:
“Still, brother, Shelley's fancy brims desire:
His soul is so acquainted with great dreams
That even the immane Elysian meadow
Whose flowers are stars and every star a world that glides and gleams,
Confines him not—but still he longs to roam
Beyond the quiet spiritual home.
—His soul is so acquainted with great dreams
That man's endeavour
He seeth not near—that broken river
Struggling—to what salt sea?

“Since man's endeavour flows as a river, how shall it turn to the hills again?
—Burst again all rosy with morning from snow-starred mountains of first renown;
Who to-day shall hear the Achaeans shout from the trench of the Troyans slain,
Who rebuild in music or memory Sparta's tower or Athena's town?

“Since the Roman intercepted and Rome's dimidiate, stoled Byzance,
Shall they hear above their cannon grave, the Periclean tune?
Christ oversang it, chivalry dimmed it, winding on Parnès the horns of France,
Islam drowned the echo of echo deep in the night of her languid moon”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Passionate thus he spake, the wise ghost unforgetful
Of stone and tree, river and shore and plain,
And the good coloured things of Earth the dead see not again,
And how man's hope grows weak and his force fretful
With such great hills to gain.
I for an answer pondered deep,
And then I seemed to fall from sleep to sleep,
Watching as through a veil I could not tear
The threads of rose and gold of Shelley's hair.
The gold glowed deeper and the rose burnt red,
And I saw running and rustling at my feet
The rivers of a golden sun that bled
Scarlet, scarlet, scarlet as though wounded
By some celestial archer of the Stars
In the last fight when God's last trump was sounded;
Then the great lake of commingling blood and fire
Burst in a fountain to my window streaming,
To my Cephisian window high and cool,
Over far Salamis and Athens gleaming,
Drowning the sea and city in one deep pool
And only now old Parnès of the West
And grey Hymettus of the dawn
Rose above the phantom seas
Like Islands of the Blest.

Then a wind came and swept and whirled away,
And the mist left Hymettus broken small
Like a swarm of golden bees.
Gone is the Poet of the magic locks,
And Byron gone; master of war's [. . . .]
Outflashes white the holy Parthenon
And broad calm streets of Athens of to-day,
And in the barracks the far bugles play,
O listen what they say!

Hark, hark the shepherd piping far and near,
The hills are dancing to the Dorian mood.
To-day Arcady is and the white Fear
Naked in sunshine glory still haunts here;
The old dark wood
Invites to prayer—or fountain in the vale
If not the Cytherean, one more dear
Daphnis shall worship—one more pale,
She too a heroine of a Grecian tale.
But if no Pheidias with marble towers
Grace our new Athens, simple, calm and wide,
Carving a group of men to look like flowers
For our new glory's pride.
If songs of gentle Solomos be less
Than that Aeschylean trump of bronze
And if beside Eurotas the lone swans
About the desolation press:

Yet still victorious Hellas, thou hast heard
Those ancient voices thundering to arms,
Thou nation of an older younger day
Thou hast gone forth as with the poet's song.
Surely the spirit of the old oak grove
Rejoiced to hear the cannon round Yannina,
Apollo launched his shaft of terror down
On Salonica. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .