Classic Poem

Blue hills, elusive, far and dim,
You lift so high beyond our care;
Where earth's horizon seems to swim,
You dream in loftier air.

Here where our world wends day by day
Its sad, material round,
We know not of that purer ray
By which your heights are bound.

Ignoble thoughts, ignoble aims
Shut us from that high heaven;
Those dawning dreams, those sunset flames,
With which your peaks are riven.

You seem so lone and bleak, so vast
Beneath your dome of sky,
So patient to the heat or blast
That smites or hurtles by;

So vague, withdrawn in mists, remote,
Shut out in glories wide;
The very fleecy clouds that float,
Your dreamings seem to hide.

We in our plots of circumstance
Are prisoners of a grim despair;
While your far shining shoulders glance
From heights where all things dare.

Could we from out this cloak of glooms
That prisons and oppresses,
But reach those large, sky-bounded rooms
Of your divine recesses;

Then might we find that godlike calm,
That peace that holdeth you,
That soars like wordless prayer or psalm
To heaven with your blue.

Then might we know that silent power,
That patience, that supreme
Indifference to day and hour
Of your eternal dream.

Then might we lose, in fire and dew
Of your pellucid airs,
This diffidence to dare and do,
That grovels and despairs.

And dream once more that high desire,
That greatness dead and gone,
When earth's winged eagles eyed the fire
Your sunrise peaks upon.

That power serene, life's vasts to scan,
Beyond earth's futile tears;
Her hopes, her curse, the bliss, the ban
Of all her anguished years.