Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/183

DARTMOUTH ODE Unto your high behest this summer hour

What answer has the poet? how shall he frame his lay?

II

THEME

To a wise bard, whose hoary head

Is bowed, like Kearsarge crouching low

Beneath a winter weight of snow,

But whose songs of passion, joy, or scorn,

Within a fiery heart are born.

For these young Magi of the East?

What wisdom find, what mystic lore,

What chant they have not heard before?

Strange words of old has every tongue

Those happy cloistered hills among;

For each riddle I divine

They can answer me with nine;

Their footsteps by the Muse are led,

Their lips on Plato's honey fed;

Their eyes have skill to read the page

Of Theban bard or Attic sage;

For them all Nature's mysteries,—

The deep-down secrets of the seas,

The cyclone's whirl, the lightning's shock,

The language of the riven rock;

They know the starry sisters seven,—

What clouds the molten suns enfold,

And all the golden woof of heaven

Unravelled in their lens behold!

Gazing in a thousand eyes,

So rapt and clear, so wonder-wise,

What shall my language picture, then,

Beyond their wont—that has not reached their ken?

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