Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ODE ON THE NINTH JUBILEE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, by LEWIS MORRIS (1833-1907)


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ODE ON THE NINTH JUBILEE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: This is a joyous day
Last Line: Willing I keep, with you, this solemn jubilee!
Subject(s): University Of Glasgow, Scotland


THIS is a joyous day
For these loved haunts, where now for centuries long
Knowledge, a maiden half-divine,
Has reared her favoured shrine.
This is a fitting theme indeed for song:
Thou dwellest here, thou shalt not pass away,
Blest Influence sublime:
This is a joyous day, and a thrice-happy time.

The hurrying ages fleet
On rapid noiseless feet
The youthful generations speed away.
Here, for their little day
They come; yet may not tarry long, but seem
Like some dim fitful dream.
They come, they carry away their little treasured gain,
They pass into the rush, the stress, the strife,
The troubled stream of life;
Each year they stay while leas are bare and cold,
But when ripe autumn clothes the fields with gold,
By the old homestead dear, with restful brain,
The peasant-scholar reaps the hard-earned grain.
Sometimes 'twould seem, as if indeed
They won with all their toil a scanty mead,
No due reward for vigils innocent,
Chill lamp-lit dawns, dim eyes and forces spent,
Deep thirst unquenched, vague aspirations high,
For peaks too faint and far for mortal eye,
The scanty meals, the solitary years,
The failures and the tears.
What has their cold and cloistered Queen to give
These youthful votaries, in haste to live,
Thro' whose full veins the hot blood courses fast,
While Pleasure with her gay train dances past?
What spell is this which keeps these young lives white,
Scorning all low delight,
And leads their struggling footsteps still
O'er rock and moor and fell, and perilous sands,
Where the bright city glimmers on the Hill,
And at the gate, smiling with outstretched hands,
A gracious Presence stands?

Oh sore-tried Youth, agile of limb and brain,
For whom Life's mystic page scarce-opened lies,
Dazzling thy eager eyes,
Here hast thou toiled and shalt, and not in vain.
Ages have passed since first to this loved place,
The future in his face,
With heart and soul aflame,
And thirsting for the emulous strife,
From many a lowly cot the ardent peasant came,
And oft prevailed and gained the goal of Life:
Jurists, Proconsuls, Statesmen dear to fame,
Divines, Discoverers, a noble band
Honouring their mother-land;
Who faring dauntless forth o'er every sea
Have reared the puissant Empire of the Free!
Oh reverend mother of a strenuous race,
We do acclaim thee, and confess thee great,
Who like thy sisters scorning Time and Fate,
Nine times to-day hast kept thy year of Jubilee!

To-day well nigh five studious ages crown
Thy story with renown,
Not 'mid the cloistered courts and lilied meads
Of our dear Isis, lit with spire and dome,
Or her grave sister of the fenland plain,
Is set thy hallowed home,
But 'mid the clangour of the enormous town,
Life's stress and toil and pain;
Where on the crowded river-reaches float,
Bearing their priceless freight to shores remote,
The deep-sunk argosies her sons have made.
Not thine the brooding calm, the Academic shade,
Where comes no murmur from the world without,
Rude struggle, clamorous shout,
To mar thy musing day-dreams. Nay, thou art
Of the loud world a part;
Triumphs of loom and forge from all the nations round
Adorn to-day thy garden ground,
Art's glittering pageants compass thee about.
Thou hast no time to dream,
And yet old Hellas deigns with thee to dwell,
Naiad and Dryad love thy precincts well;
The aery Nymphs of Number and of Line
Are still as ever thine;
The searcher tracks dread Nature's secret powers,
Thro' the hushed midnight hours;
Nor ever on thy patient selfless toil
The blight of Mammon comes to vex or soil
The people's Academe.

Therefore it is I bring,
I whose sole gift it is to sing,
This willing tribute of a hasty lay,
For I in our dear Wales have loved to mark
Sound learning's new-lit spark
Dispel at last the weary age-long night;
Have known thy altar fires from which it came
And fed long time the flickering nascent flame,
Till now it shines a broad effulgent light,
From sister-beacons three,
By mast-thronged port, lone hills, and sounding sea,
And interchanging each with each
Thy sons and theirs alternate learn and teach,
Hastening the dawn of Man's increasing Day;
Nor least of all because
One. near in blood and name,
Preferring Science and her fruitful laws
To the Bard's hazardous fame,
Spends here laborious days; content to see
Upon the toil-stained Clyde
Part offspring of his hand and brain,
Mighty to rule at need the subject-main,
The steel-clad cruisers ride;
For these, and that I prize the precious thirst
For knowledge which we gained from Scotland first,
Willing I keep, with you, this solemn Jubilee!





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