Classic Poem

I

To thee, fair isle, Italia's satellite,
 Italian harps their native measures lend;
Yet, wooing sweet diversity, not quite
 Thy octaves with Italia's octave blend;
Six streaming lines amass the arrowy might
 In hers, one cataract couplet doth expend;
Thine lakewise widens, level in the light,
 And like to its beginning is its end.

II

The blade, unbuckled from the warrior's side,
 Hath oft-times fought against its former lord;
And oft the eagle's blood an arrow dyed,
 Plumed from the very wing wherewith he soared;
And oft, to have on other hearts relied,
 The heart has late and bitterly deplored;
But I will make my constancy my pride,
 And worship aye where I have once adored.

III

As when a prophet rapt unto the skies,
 Remanded then to earth, for pledge doth claim
Some leaf new plucked from groves of Paradise,
 Or gem imbued with no terrestrial flame,
Lest, when at length the disenchanted eyes
 Ope on the wonted world, his heart grow tame
And sceptic of its own high histories;
 Thus only doth the Poet covet Fame.

IV

Spring's ravished blossoms garment not the blast,
 Not for its wrecks doth Ocean statelier roll;
The Roman glutton's nightingale repast
 Did ne'er one lip to melody control;
Thou wilt not, moth, be Psyche at the last
 For fretting Beauty's silk and Learning's scroll;
But what is so unprofitably cast
 As lovely form around a loveless soul?

V

The mightiest sea its times of ebbing knows;
 The purest flame hath smoke and ashes wan;
The butterfly a reptile's youth, the rose
 An earthy root; a heavy flight the swan;
The sabre is not all an edge; nor grows
 The almond with the almond-bloom, upon
Damascus in her orchards frown the snows
 Indissolubly heaped on Lebanon.

VI

Philosophy, first of God-given things,
 How vain his thought whoever would contrive
To blend thy lamp-oil with Castalian springs,
 And make Minerva with Apollo wive!
Glad carols who spontaneously sings
 Seeks not their school who meditate and strive;
Which were as though the rose should put on wings,
 And go to gather sweetness at the hive.

VII

'Tis heaven to learn thy lot no longer crost;
 'Tis hell to know it raised o'er mine so far;
If the sweet fellowship of fate be lost,
 Not all the Gods can keep us as we are;
If they in sooth can stay the spirit's frost,
 Then welcome jealousy, and ire, and jar;
Better Love's bark on desperate billows tost
 Than sailing safely by another's star.

VIII

To thee 'tis pleasure, haply, to have brought
 Home costly ware from Ormus or Japan;
And thine, when long and keen pursuit has caught
 Strange bird, or Psyche gay with veinèd fan;
And thine, to spell some sentence, wisdom-fraught,
 In palimpsest or Arab alcoran;
And mine, to seize some rare and coloured thought,
 And cage it in my verse Sicilian.