Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ODE TO MOUNT HOOD, by WILLIAM STEWARD GORDON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ODE TO MOUNT HOOD, by                    
First Line: Author of music, majesty, and might
Last Line: And is to be thine only potentate.
Subject(s): Mount Hood, Oregon


Author of music, majesty, and might,
Lift me to nobler heights than I have known—
Expand my soul, breathe bigness in my words,
For mighty Hood demands a song high-pitched
Above mere Kipling rhymes and common things.
No puny pipes o' Pan play here on reeds,
But Boreas, whose smile the rainbow is,
Sounds forth his deep-voiced organ of the North.

Majestic monarch of the proud Cascades,
I drink thy beauty as the gates of dawn
Are lifting o'er thy gilded glacier fields.
Was heaven stripped of all her gorgeous dyes
To paint this rainbow on the skies, that fills
The vast horizon's arch, and crowns in light
Thy solemn silhouette against the sky?

What cataclysm reared thy mighty form
And strewed thy fragments for a hundred miles?
Does old Æolus, fabled King of Winds,
Dwell here, "Steel's Cliff" his brazen sounding board,
His acolytes the harpies of the storm?
From whence this curling smoke and sulphur fumes,
And why this heat around thy ancient throat?
Will Stygian fury some day spew its rage
Anew on lurid skies and leaping hills?
On Cloud Cap Inn, and new Pompeii's Camps?

No "Alps on Alps" beyond thy crest arise.
With ermine robe and Hermes' fleecy veil
Thou hast the morn's first kiss and last good-night.
Just now the dove of peace hangs o'er thy head
And hovers gently in the sleepy clouds,
Which pendant hang as o'er a newborn heaven—
But while I speak, I hear the rumbling storm
Like chariots o'er these hollow fields of ice,
And heaven's dome is etched with zigzag light,
And frescoed with the foam that breaks around
Thy head—the target of the thunderbolt.

Thy lakes and caves are reservoirs of power,
Thy cliffs and canyons, autographs of God.
These pinnacles are heaven-pointing hands,
These jutting ledges, arabesques divine.
No Pharaoh bleaches 'neath thy pyramid—
Nor was it built by blood of goaded serfs—
The Lord alone reigns here—he was, and is,
And is to be thine only potentate.





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