Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FOR THE CENTENARY OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, by WILLIAM BRIAN HOOKER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FOR THE CENTENARY OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When the slow cycle of a hundred years
Last Line: And in strange tongues bid the brave ghost appear.
Alternate Author Name(s): Hooker, Brian
Subject(s): Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)


When the slow cycle of a hundred years
Out of the dark some golden date uprears
Whose causal numbers form a spell to raise
Dead virtues up amid appointed praise,
Conjure huge ghosts out of their gorgeous gloom
And lay brief wreaths on some immortal tomb, --
How many celebrants completely know
What acts deserve the homage they bestow?
How many of the multitudes who throng
To laud the Singer, that have heard the song?
Or, while they hail the Artist's deed supreme,
Dwell with him in the beauty of his dream?
The leaders of the hour -- a few at most --
Honour a man: the people praise a ghost.
Theirs not to ask what made the holiday --
The priest proclaims; the worshippers obey:
From mouldering shrines the festal fires arise,
And unknown gods are throned in alien skies;
Forgotten deeds their sires commemorate,
And names remembered prove their bearers great.

So we to-night raise monumental breath
To works already crumbling into death,
Pay each unopened tome a generous meed --
Delight to honour, and decline to read.
Who rambles with the Rambler? Who hath power
To invoke the Idler for an idle hour,
Thread the great Lexicon's laborious mass,
Or wrestle in the waste with Rasselas?
Yet ... we do well. Smile as we may on those
Who praise immortal works that no one knows,
We need not bear that charge, who celebrate
No man ephemeral whom his deeds made great --
No Artist, whose dominion and control
End with his work -- we celebrate a soul.
Johnson has been and is: here stands his pride --
A spirit living whose exploits have died.

Have you not known some friend whom but to see
Was Faith, whose silence was Philosophy,
Whose presence Love -- yet bore a common fate
And did no deed of those which men call great?
In whom all powers burned but could not shine --
A poet, though he never wrote a line,
A general whose wars were all a jest,
A prince whose kingdom was the passing guest,
A saint at heart, who loved the homely strife
And gay sins of an ordinary life --
Who wore his human frailties like a crown,
Whose humour kept his colder virtues down
Lest they should leave the kindly earth, and rise
Snow-peaked to the discomfortable skies?
On such men's graves no formal blooms are flung --
They live unheralded and die unsung;
Nor can our words their secret worth convey
To light the darkness of a later day.
Yet there is little need. Their lives live on
Beyond all fame that genius might have won.
They dwell in us, to whom their frequence lent
A Being greater than Accomplishment, --
A joy in joy, a strength to stand unawed
Before the storms of pain, a proof of God.

So much the virtue of a soul proceeds
More from itself than from its actual deeds;
So much the giver is the gift's best worth --
The man more potent than his work on earth --
That legendary kings deserve their fame
But by a breath, tradition, and a name.
Great men their eulogists immortalize,
And shine reflected in unbodied eyes.
So we discover that Athenian Sage
Not on his own but on another's page,
And by this tribute read his wisdom clear:
That Plato stooped to be his chronicler.
And so with Johnson. Though his works be dust,
His words dim with unconquerable rust,
The man lives on -- a legend and a face
Stamped on the coinage of our English race.
What though his windmill foes be all o'erthrown?
His heart still fights with dragons in our own.
What though great friends his lustre overdim?
He lived with giants, and they honored him.
Still on the vast horizon of the years,
Over the kneeling radiance of his peers,
His craggy figure towers: quaint, uncouth,
A savage bravery of homely truth,
A courage stumbling on through toil and pain,
A clumsy humour, and a clean disdain, --
A cloudy pillar of sustained desire
Which, when the gloom o'erwhelmed it, turned to fire;
An Ursa Major, wheeling round the pole
Outlined in stars, and every star a soul --
Souls of less worth more visibly expressed
Whose light keeps the great shadow manifest.

Not only those who dwell in ancient days
To Johnson's name pay veritable praise;
Not only they whose learning holds by heart
The musty worthiness his words impart --
We, like blind mirrors, hold his image clear,
And in strange tongues bid the brave ghost appear.





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