Opening the book my gaze fell on that line
Wherein the marvelous poet, the divine
Singer of Endymion, his deathless song
Began, and so beginning made immortal.
O dead, undying bard! now all the wrong
Fate did thee rose; through Memory's drapèd portal
Trooped, in wan figures, all thy tragic story—
But mightier still the wonder and the glory
Of that white page whereon thy soul was poured.
Then with thy spirit my spirit likewise soared;
Something immortal entered in this breast
Miraculously; and like one confessed
And throughly shriven, back to the world I turned
While a new heart within me flamed and burned.
And yet that morn, when grew the glare and din,
The day began, as other days begin.
A POET'S QUESTION
What, then, shall make these songs of mine more real;
More tuneful, piercing, bright—miraculous,
As art should be? Shall some high, fortunate chant,
Some song to come, flood backward on them all,—
Over every word in all the singing flock,—
A light, a meaning; a power to seize, to thrill;
A swift beatitude and haunting beauty;
Shall make of them a trouble to the base,
Scourge to the false, sun to the darkened soul,
Help to the fainting, succor to the bruised,
A judgment to the heeding and unheeding?
Or shall a flame leap from the singer's flight,
Making them luminous in sudden dawn—
Bright in the chrism of Death.
