Classic Poem

While bent on singing your delightful gifts
In lofty rhyme, O little virgins chaste,
Sweet little angels of the flowery brooks,
Sleep seized me on the golden point of morn,
And I beheld a choir of your small people,
Who, with the tongue with which they take the honey,
Buzzed forth in the clear air these earnest words: —
" O friendly soul, that after the long lapse
Of thrice five hundred years, dost please thee sing
Our toils and art, shun — shun, we pray thee, rhyme:
Shun rhyme, and its rebounding noise. Full well
Thou know'st, that the invisible voice which sits
Answering to calls in rocks, Echo by name,
Was hostile to us ever: and thou know'st —
Or dost thou not? — that she, who was herself
Turned to a hollow rock, first found out rhyme.
Learn further then, that wheresoe'er she dwells,
No bee can dwell, for very hate and dread
Of her importunate and idle babble."

Such were the words that issued from that choir;
Then 'twixt my lips they put some honey drops,
And so in gladness took their flight aloft.
Whence I, with such divinity made strong,
Doubt not, O bees, to sing your race renowned
In Tuscan verse, freed from the clangs of rhyme
Yea, I will sing how the celestial boon,
Honey, by some sweet mystery of the dew,
Is born of air in bosoms of the flowers,
Liquid, serene; and how the diligent bees
Collect it, working further with such art,
That odorous tapers thence deck holy shrines.
O sights, and O effects, lovely and strange!
Full of the marvellous and the beautiful!