"FAULTILY faultless" may be ill -- "Carefully careless" is worse still. I bought of late a book of rhyme -- One long, fierce flout at tune and time; Ragged and jagged by intent, As if each line were earthquake-rent; Leagues on seismal leagues of it, Not unheroically writ, By one of whom I had been told That he, in scorn of canons old, Pedantic laws effete and dead, Went fearless to the pure well-head Of song's most ancient legislature -- Art's uncorrupted mother, Nature. Nature! whose lapidary seas Labour a pebble without ease, Till they unto perfection bring That miracle of polishing; Who never negligently yet Fashioned an April violet, Nor would forgive, did June disclose Unceremoniously the rose; Who makes the toadstool in the grass The carven ivory surpass, So guiltless of a fault or slip Is its victorious workmanship; Who suffers us pure Form to see In a dead leaf's anatomy; And pondering long where greenly sleep The unravished secrets of the deep, Bids the all-courted pearl express Her final thoughts on flawlessness; But visibly aches when doomed to bring Some inchoate amorphous thing Into a world her curious wit Would fain have shaped all-exquisite As the acorn cup's simplicity, Or the Moon's patience with the sea, Or the superb, the golden grief Of each October for each leaf, Phrased in a rhetoric that excels Isaiah's and Ezekiel's. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.: 74 by ALFRED TENNYSON WHY DRINK WINE by HENRY ALDRICH ONE WOMAN by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH PSALM 114 by OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE PLANTING CORN IN VERMONT by DANIEL LEAVENS CADY |