Classic Poem

I can but fill the page I owe
With pictures of the things I see.
I pause to feel the noontide glow,
And bless what God ordains to be.

This tireless harmony of life,
Impulse and weight divinely poised;
This upward flight of Thought and Love,
These slow perfections, recognized.

And could I ask, it were to heal
The struggles of this Mother-mould,
That flings us flaming, from its breast,
That hides our ashes, spent and cold.

I could implore great gifts of Peace
To ransom grief-embittered hearts,
That self might sink, that Wrath might cease,
And Plenty speed the genial Arts.

There are who thread unmeasured heights
With spirits for their body-guard,
Who vex with ill-directed flight,
And sentence, mystical, and hard.

I shrink before the nameless draught
That helps to such unearthly things,
And if a drug could lift so high,
I would not trust its treacherous wings;

Lest, lapsing from them, I should fall,
A weight more dead than stock or stone, —
The warning fate of those who fly
With pinions other than their own.

The steady spheres of God outvie
The fitful meteors of the brain;
These may be wanting to our need.
To those, we never look in vain.

We sleep in grief, or watch in pain,
Or crushed with guilty burthens lie;
We rise to meet th' unfailing stars
That smile forgiveness loftily.

So Dante, from his dreadful way
Emerging, new in fear and awe,
The heavenly signal recognized,
And stood to bless th' eternal law.

I lift my waning sight to them,
Unchanged thro' all these changing years,
And, strong in friends that cannot fail,
Forget my errors, leave my tears.