Demeter and other poems/To Professor Jebb

by Alfred Tennyson

TO PROFESSOR JEBB,

With the Following Poem.

Fair things are slow to fade away,
Bear witness you, that yesterday^[1]
   From out the Ghost of Pindar in you
Roll'd an Olympian; and they say^[2]

That here the torpid mummy wheat
Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet
   As that which gilds the glebe of England,
Sunn’d with a summer of milder heat.

So may this legend for awhile,
If greeted by your classic smile,
   Tho' dead in its Trinacrian Enna,
Blossom again on a colder isle.

1. In Bologna.
2. They say, for the fact is doubtful.