Classic Poem

The groves are fill'd with murmurs and the ways
With sound;
The choric birds sing canticles of praise;
Along the stony ground
The hoofs of horses clatter and resound,
Waking reverberations strange and deep;
E'en in the dead of night
Is Nature ever stirring in her sleep,
And the sea, far and near,
With stress and tumult shouts into the ear:
The winds take up the message and repeat;
O'er far-off meadows peals their anthem sweet.
A thousand cries
Are round us; ever, when a hush succeeds,
Stars in the circle of the moving skies
Float whispers down, and upon flowers and weeds
Not without murmur does the dew descend.

O chants and litanies intoned so loud,
O medley'd minstrelsy of pain and mirth,
Ascending — a confused crowd —
And echoing from end to end
Of all the resonant earth!
Some spell upon your music lies,
As hangs enchantment upon drooping eyes,
And howsoe'er your founts are stirr'd
There issues not the saving Word;
The music's volume and the organ's roll —
In place of voice, that melody of soul.
Stars seem to strive at speech and birds at rhyme,
And pregnant rumours pass at even-time,
While out on the tremendous main
The surges break and shout, and break again;
We seem to wait
For ever at the opening gate
Of resonant, intelligible speech,
And ever still the Word is out of reach.

When in the higher moments of the soul,
Ascending from divided things,
Almost it seems to snatch the whole
Of that which Nature's chorus sings,
Yet comes there neither note nor tone
It all rejects or all can own —
A subtle something proving short
Of base and bond subtending all:
How deep is here the chord's report,
How shallow there the notes may fall;
So ever on profounder meaning's brink
The oracles back into vagueness sink,
And wanting the true Word, or dispossess'd,
Nature is consolation but not rest!

Maintaining still a solemn state
And pageant, inarticulate
At every gateway of our dreams
Her echo or her rumour seems;
A tale upon the point of telling,
A prophecy for ever spelling
And yet not wholly spell'd,
Because the application is withheld;
The matter of the Word on every side
Resounding, but the sense denied.

Perchance in some far epoch of the past,
O Nature's music, to the Word thou wast
More closely wedded than is speech to man!
Perchance thy measure moveth still
To meet the meaning which shall fill
Thy widely resonant span.
Howe'er this be, we know the Word is ours,
Though not in all the fulness of its powers;
And in the great concerted plan
Perchance thy strings and tones are lent
As an accompanying instrument
By man alone interpreted,
And from his voice and speech, in tone and string,
Reflected meaning borrowing.
Sound to us therefore as we dream and drift,
Thou who dost aid the soul her voice to lift,
By her unseen conductor taught and led;
And when time's gates flow open, still prolong —
Great Leader, past these measures — her supernal song!