Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ON A COPY OF KEATS' 'ENDYMION', by CLINTON SCOLLARD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ON A COPY OF KEATS' 'ENDYMION', by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Has not the glamoured season come once more
Last Line: Still thrill the heart, still fill the listening sky!
Subject(s): Keats, John (1795-1821); Poetry & Poets


HAS not the glamoured season come once more,
When earth puts on her arras of soft green?
See where along the meadow rillet's shore
The wild-rose buds unfold!
Eastward the boughs with murmurous laughter lean
To warm themselves in morning's generous gold.
The foxgloves nod along the English lanes
That saw erewhile the dancing sprites of snow;
Night-long the leaf-hid nightingale complains
With such melodious woe
That Sleep, enamored of her soaring strains,
Is widely wakeful as the dim hours go.

Ope but the page -- and hark, the impassioned bird
That through the hush of the be-shadowed hours
Pours in the ear of dark its melting word!
Here is as mellow song
As ever welled from pleached laurel bowers,
Or e'er was borne soft orient winds along;
Here may one list all ecstasies they sung,
The shepherds and the maid of Arcady,
Flower-garlanded what time the world was young; --
Pandean minstrelsy,
Low flutings from slim pipes of silver tongue
Played by the dryads on some upland lea.

And blent with these are heavenly whisperings
As faint as whitening poplars make at dawn,
Sublime suggestions of fine-fingered strings
Touched in celestial air,
And earthward through the dulling ether drawn,
Yet falling on us more than earthly fair;
The voice divine that young Endymion knew
In the cool woodland's darkmost depths by night,
When godlike ardors thrilled him through and through;
And his voice from the height
Whither, on wakening, drenched with chilly dew,
He sought the goddess in the gathering light.

But ah, what mournful memories are mine,
Song-wakened at this lavish summer-tide!
Can I forget that somber cypress line
By old Rome's ruined wall,
The lonely grave that alien grasses hide,
And the pathetic silence shrouding all?
Who would forget? Blest be the song that bears
My soul across aerial seas of space
As wingedly as airy fancy fares!
For now that earth's worn face
The radiant glow of life's renewal wears,
Would I in reverence seek that sacred place.

There would I lay these woven shreds of rhyme
In lieu of scattered heart's-ease and the rose.
Behold how Song has triumphed over Time,
For still his song rings clear,
Though where the tender Roman violet grows
Deep has he slumbered many a fateful year!
If to the poet's rapt imaginings
Beauty to be wed, with love of purpose high,
Despite the cynic and his scornful flings
Song shall not fail and die,
But like the bird that up the azure springs
Still thrill the heart, still fill the listening sky!





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