Page:The Soul of a Century.djvu/49



World! Master Poet! You have passed through aeons long Before you set the stars in the verses of your song; Before, each single sun and its planet’s varied flowers, You wove in rhythmic cadences of poetic sparkling showers. ‘Ere out of the confusion of your chaotic thought You brought the suns together and set their wars at nought. ‘Ere to the new-born earth you said: “Awake to life!” When first you set the pace of a heart’s pulsating beat, Brought light to human eyes and said: “Go forth to strife.”

World! Master Poet! Your Hymn outlives all time Your every stanza breathes life’s restless, ageless rhyme And when it blooms, your hands once more enfold As grateful seeds of life, death’s lifeless, pallid mold. World! Master Poet! What span your Hymns’ wide wings? Darkened mystic depths, across the world’s hidden springs. Tell me how far the wings of your hymns are spread? When ’cross the sea they bic w, the ocean’s bottoms rise When through the land they blow, the earth smolders to the skies. When o’er the skies they blow, worlds pause as in breathless dread.

World! Master Poet! What meaning holds your Hymn? All that within it dies, immortally lives on? There is no beauty known that does not bloom in you, There is no morn yet born that shines not in your dew. There is no ray of light that you do not reflect, And not a flower to which you pay not your respect.

Nor are there feathered throats that do not sing your strain, No children’s laughter where it does not ring out, There are no tears through which your sorrow does not spout, No wild despair wherein it does not tug in vain. There is no struggle that your thunder does not feed, No martyred hero known through whom you did not bleed. There is no longing thought in which it does not breathe, No love, no passion known wherein it does not seethe. There are no hearts on earth with tender, kindred feeling, That do not beat in tune with your Hymn’s majestic pealing.

World! Master Poet! You are the poet’s God And yet a poet too, in whose footsteps all bards must plod. And though your Hymn is as spacious as the sky, What you offer therein, but your mere fragments of your ‘I’. And we who read today the lines you wrote before, We are enthused, yet say; “The poet felt much more.” You with a creator’s joy must share the creator’s pain, And who of those who read, know the anguish your Hymns contain.