Come, Poet, come!

COME, Poet, come! A thousand labourers ply their task, And what it tends to scarcely ask, And trembling thinkers on the brink Shiver, and know not how to think. To tell the purport of their pain, And what our silly joys contain; In lasting lineaments pourtray The substance of the shadowy day; Our real and inner deeds rehearse, And make our meaning clear in verse: Come, Poet, come! for but in vain We do the work or feel the pain, And gather up the seeming gain, Unless before the end thou come To take, ere they are lost, their sum.

Come, Poet, come! To give an utterance to the dumb, And make vain babblers silent, come; A thousand dupes point here and there, Bewildered by the show and glare; And wise men half have learned to doubt Whether we are not best without. Come, Poet; both but wait to see Their error proved to them in thee.

Come, Poet, come! In vain I seem to call. And yet Think not the living times forget. Ages of heroes fought and fell That Homer in the end might tell; O’er grovelling generations past Upstood the Doric fane at last; And countless hearts on countless years Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears, Rude laughter and unmeaning tears; Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome The pure perfection of her dome. Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown, The dead forgotten and unknown.