Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, PROEM (PROMETHEUS), by CHARLES KINGSLEY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

PROEM (PROMETHEUS), by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Speak! But ask us not to be as ye were!
Last Line: Child, the live unborn.
Subject(s): Prometheus


I

Speak! but ask us not to be as ye were!
All but God is changing day by day.
He who breathes on man the plastic spirit
Bids us mould ourselves its robe of clay.

II

Old anarchic floods of revolution,
Drowning ill and good alike in night,
Sink, and bare the wrecks of ancient labor,
Fossil-teeming, to the searching light.

III

There will we find laws, which shall interpret,
Through the simpler past, existing life;
Delving up from mines and fairy caverns
Charmed blades, to cut the age's strife.

IV

What though fogs may stream from draining waters?
We will till the clays to mellow loam;
Wake the graveyard of our fathers' spirits;
Clothe its crumbling mounds with blade and bloom.

V

Old decays but foster new creations;
Bones and ashes feed the golden corn;
Fresh elixirs wander every moment,
Down the veins through which the live past feeds its
child, the live unborn.





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