Classic Poem

Each evening on the ethereal canvas wide
I paint new sunsets, colouring all the air.
When Turner failed and flung his brush aside,
I touched the heaven,—the longed-for tint was there.

Yet who will gaze each evening at the sky?
Who cares to contemplate my work supreme?
Unnoticed, shade by shade, the bright tints die.
Man lusts for gold, while God and poets dream.

When my sonorous thunder-pæans sound,
What audience have I in the heights of space?
When my stars fill the air for leagues around,
Frail man is staring in some harlot's face.

Alone I travel o'er the shoreless sky;
Alone in labour, and in pain and strife.
I cross the surges of eternity
While man sails round the land-locked bay of life.

What genius-loneliness is like to mine?
Man shapes one statue, or he paints one face;
A poet's soul lives in one single line,
A woman's beauty in one curve of grace:

Upon one earth ye suffer and ye groan:
Your Jesus for one suffering sad world died:
But I—for ever past my lonely throne
Sweeps the great stars' illimitable tide.

I rule new nations in vast star on star:
My thought creates new eras, one by one.
I steer across the blue sky's harbour-bar
Daily the giant ship ye call the sun.

Nor only one sun. Through the waves of space
Millions of sun-ships plunge upon their way.
I am the sole spectator of their race;
My touch upon the helm they all obey.

And yet my love can pulse through space and time.
Does one sad woman in the wintry gloom,
Despairing, maddened through another's crime,
Wait, while the dark waves tempt her to her doom?

Does one frail heart of woman long to die.
Hurling her sorrow deep into the wave?
There is the God of all things. There am I.
There is the love that even yet can save.

There is the love that from the central throne
Listening can hear the accents of despair:
Can hear through all the stars a woman's moan;
Answer the strong man's agony of prayer.

Aye, if hell's ocean seeks to swallow one
Frail human sinner, blood-stained though he be
The love of God will bid the mighty sun
Rescue the sinner, and dry up the sea.