Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ON A REDBREAST SINGING AT THE GRAVE OF PLATO (IN THE GROVE OF ACADEME), by WILLIAM SHARP


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ON A REDBREAST SINGING AT THE GRAVE OF PLATO (IN THE GROVE OF ACADEME), by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The rose of gloaming everywhere!
Last Line: For a robin's song!
Alternate Author Name(s): Macleod, Fiona
Subject(s): Academia; Greece; Hebrides (islands), Scotland; Home; Iona, Scotland; Plato (428-348 B.c.); Pleasure; Robins; Greeks


The rose of gloaming everywhere!
And through the silence cool and sweet
A song falls through the golden air
And stays my feet—
For there! . . .
This very moment surely I have heard
The sudden, swift, incalculable word
That takes me o'er the foam
Of these empurpling, dim Ionian seas,
That takes me home
To where
Far on an isle of the far Hebrides
Sits on a spray of gorse a little home-sweet bird.

The great white Attic poplars rise,
And down their tremulous stairs I hear
Light airs and delicate sighs.
Even here
Outside this grove of ancient olive-trees,
Close by this trickling murmuring stream,
Was laid long, long ago, men say,
That lordly Prince of Peace
Who loved to wander here from day to day,
Plato, who from this Academe
Sent radiant dreams sublime
Across the troubled seas of time,
Dreams that not yet are passed away,
Nor faded grown, nor grey,
But white, immortal are
As that great star
That yonder hangs above Hymettos' brow.

But now
It is not he, the Dreamer of the Dream,
That holds my thought.
Greece, Plato, and the Academe
Are all forgot:
It is as though I am unloosed by hands:
My heart aches for the grey-green seas
That hold a lonely isle
Far in the Hebrides,
An isle where all day long
The redbreast's song
Goes fluting on the wind o'er lonely sands.

So beautiful, so beautiful
Is Hellas, here.
Divinely clear
The mellow golden air,
Filled, as a rose is full,
Of delicate flame:
And oh the secret tides of thought and dream
That haunt this slow Kephisian stream!
But yet more sweet, more beautiful, more dear
The secret tides of memory and thought
That link me to the far-off shore
For which I long—
Greece, Plato, and the Academe forgot
For a robin's song!






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