Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE NORMAN POET'S REWARD, by CHARLES THEOPHILE FERET


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE NORMAN POET'S REWARD, by                    
First Line: Look not for gold -- the sickly sons of ease
Last Line: -- the skald's undying ecstasy!
Subject(s): Fame; Love; Mythology - Classical; Orpheus; Poetry & Poets - French; Reputation


LOOK not for gold -- The sickly sons of ease,
Who bid the wealth of Midas for a stew
Of crass cacophony, have naught for you.
With barefoot Homer pace the Cyclades,
Then laud the simians of Chicago's zoo.
Can'st reconcile the Olympians with these;
Or hive the warring wasps with Attic bees?
-- Nay, Love shall yield me revenue.
&
Lift not thine eyes to Love! Sing, minstrel, sing
To patrons blue with alcohol, and cry:
"I smell the rose of Sappho!" in the sty.
Where danced the Thracian bacchantes Boom is King.
Ah, if thy venal lute forget to sigh
The sweetness of the tyrant's tortured Spring,
Sad Horace, will thy lord his largess fling?
-- Nay, leaves upon my bust shall lie.

How many an Orpheus is the dupe of Fame!
Hope not for transient glory graved in stone.
Thy mariners and cowherds are unknown
In Paris, where the seers the singers name.
When o'er thy fields a hundred years have blown,
Some Puck, perchance, thy music may reclaim
From faery mirth that sets the moon a flame
-- That friend I crave, that friend alone.

Bard, wilt thou know thy dream-envestured shade
When it shall climb the dark and tottering stair
To read thy poems? Will its gossamer dare
Dispute with rats the parchment gnawed and frayed?
Shall doubted eyes through windowed gloom be ware
Of eyes, whose iris splendours never fade?
When thou art dead where shall thy barque unlade?
Where beacons of the Vikings flare!

No heaven awaits thee. Thy ancestral God
Sleeps in oblivion by the abysmal sea.
O plaintive Ovid, weep thine elegy
To rustic Goth or Scythian sandal-shod,
But not to Love or Immortality.
What shalt thou keep when, rended by the rod,
Death casts thee to the worm-enwoven sod?
-- The skald's undying ecstasy!





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