Classic Poem

I

A THOUSAND acorns through the mould,
One summer in the days of old,
Burst forth into the sun and breeze
To grow into a thousand trees,
To fight the storm and brave the cold,
And live through many centuries.

There came a keen, untimely frost;
Five hundred infant oaks were lost.
And then the herds that chanced that way,
The browsing kine and lambs at play
Among the hillocks greenly mossed,
Cropped down four hundred in a day.

A hundred oaks were left to grow,
But fourscore perished in the snow;
And of the score that still remain
Ten fall before the hurricane,
Ten challenge all the winds that blow
And cast their shade o'er all the plain.

But, as the years pass on, one oak
Lies shattered by the thunder-stroke,
And one is felled, the woodman's prey:
One falls through it's own heart's decay;
One in the whirlwind's fury broke,
And two the torrents swept away.

Four oaks now toward the sun aspire;
One falls before an earthquake dire,
And one is dragged away in chains
A keel to plough the ocean plains;
One withers in a forest fire,
And one — one only oak — remains.

And there it stands, the centuries' pride,
The monarch of the mountain side,
Blessed by five hundred summers bland,
By breaths of ferny fragrance fanned;
But no one notes the oaks that died —
They are forgotten in the land.

II

Each summer 'mid the waste and weeds
Doth Nature sow immortal seeds,
And scatter over field and fen,
Through tumbled gorge and babbling glen,
The seeds of men of mighty deeds,
Seeds of a thousand deathless men.

A thousand men of loftier strain,
Of ampler soul and subtler brain,
By Nature's unexhausted hand
Are sown each year in every land —
Strong men, and dowered to attain
The heights where the immortals stand.

But many in a sordid age
Yield up their birthright heritage,
And, scorched by traffic's poison breath,
Their germ of grandeur withereth;
For tinsel, tags, and equipage
They give their better parts to death.

And some forget their mighty trust
Through weakness mixed with human dust;
They burn with phosphorescent fire
Engendered in the slime and mire;
Are torn by tigers of their lust,
And slain by dragons of desire.

And some from their high path depart
Through inborn cowardice of heart;
Some fall unnoted in the stress
Of their unneighbored loneliness;
Some freely choose the baser part,
And greatness yields to littleness.

And some whose tainted blood is rife
With poison at the core of life,
Who cry, " The fault is not in us! "
But Fate will pause not to discuss —
They perish in the unequal strife
Who fight with beasts at Ephesus.

And some send out their branching shoots,
But perish from unwatered roots;
Some, smit by sorrow's thunder-stone,
Go down at midnight and alone;
Some, charmed by pleasure's shawms and flutes,
Play no high music of their own.

III

A thousand men were sown broadcast —
Mayhap but one survives at last.
He shapes our thoughts and rules our ways,
And lives an endless length of days,
And mates the mighty of the past,
Enshrined in Pantheon pomp of praise.

Immortal are the songs he sings,
And deathless is the word he brings;
Aye, deathless is his very breath,
Far, far his long thought journeyeth;
But, ah! his termless life — it springs
From the dark soil of many deaths.