Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO A DEAD POET, by HERBERT TRENCH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO A DEAD POET, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: If the meteor mind, swift-ranger
Last Line: Wider than the wave ethereal, murmurs alone. . . .
Subject(s): Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)


IF the meteor mind, swift-ranger,
Destroyer and all-changer,
Must die on earth a stranger
Leaving a trail
Of brilliance frail
A portent and a danger,

Hail! friendly overtrower,
Sifter of fames, foreknower,
Before whom eyelids lower
And droop away
the gods of day;
Death, thou art sight-bestower!

For all men's fames, O sternest
Deific priest, thou burnest
On altars deeply furnaced,
Aloft the peak
All climbers seek
Thou winnowest, thou discernest!

And when thy embrace uncloaketh
The false and true it yoketh,
When slow libation smoketh,
And all the host
That wronged him most
The singer's urn convoketh,

How utterly remouldeth
The flame that all enfoldeth!
No more the scolder scoldeth,
One would have said
Some God were dead;
He worships who beholdeth.

How soon the crowd bemoaneth
As though such grief atoneth
The beauty it dethroneth;
It shrines the pen
The mantle then,
The man himself it stoneth!

Night sinks unto the verges,
Fierce hate no longer urges,
Foe beside foe emerges
The wild beasts slake
At one fell lake
The desert in their gurges.

Now by the brain they blunted,
Now by the heart they hunted,
Now by the soul they stunted
Even here to-night,
In the banquet-light,
The cowards are confronted!

And at last the songs confuted
Of this vagabond sweet-luted
Celestial, persecuted,
Poor mystagogue,
Or drunken rogue,
Are by the world saluted.

II

When I think of him, comes gliding
A perfume strange, abiding,
Of a flower I saw when riding
One summer night
In the Dolomite
When stars did all the guiding.

Earth shone an ice-cold planet
With never an eye to scan it
And no God's breath to man it,
And below me fell
Heights, sheer to hell,
One gloomy wall of granite.

Dismounted, I leaned over
And the dim chasm did discover
Far down, where eagles hover,
On a footless place
In the precipice-face
Sky-coloured flowers, in clover.

As I gazed down, fear-dissembling,
Their moon-lit bells, assembling
Azure virgins, resembling
Exquisite dancers
Waved me up answers
Out of that gulf of trembling.

So 'mid inhuman splendour
Chaotic, bleak, untender
To all that skies engender
In giddy air
These poems rare
Do flutter, wild and slender.

III

Therefore we hail him, winged poet undated,
Backward-gazer, seer Chaldean belated,
Hymning Terror and Chaos, as Earth in her vagrance
Leaves long behind her in space wild tresses of fragrance, --
Hymning all wonder, as momently gray Earth breaketh
Still into spaces new, and new-eyed awaketh!

He floats in the ivory boat he hath carven for pleasure,
On, down a faery gorge, as one treads a measure,
Bound for the paradise still where his heart hath treasure.
Deep-wombed valleys delight him, ambrosial, clouded
Clear streams wan with lilies and forest-shrouded,
Walled by autumnal mountains, all sunset-lustred,
Streams that mirror the cypress, dark, cedar-clustered.

Down the mid-flood he bears through a vaporous Rhineland
Borne in his plumed shallop by pool and vineland
(Strange and phantasmal country!) by towers enchanted
Ablaze with his enemies' souls or by demons haunted.
Broideries droop no longer from keep or casement
Ruins honeycombed with horror and foul abasement.
Rats swim off in the water -- dead shoulders welter --
Cold on the bulwark, lo, a dead hand craves shelter.
No, he must hasten past, this poet unfriended,
He too is shelterless, cold, till this voyage be ended.

Melodies dark he sings, low-toned, melancholy,
He, too, has wrestled with Gods in his radiant folly,
He, too, has felt the breath of passion too near him,
Still the lost ecstasy clings, and lost arms ensphere him.
O high houses crumbling down to the water,
He seeks one lost and gone, the heaven's wise daughter!
Named under many names, although none recalls her --
Ligeia or Berenice, ah, what befalls her?

Valleys and forests and cities that Time enchanteth,
Have they not marked her passing for whom he panteth?
"None hath gone by, O Genius serene and somber!
Whom dost thou still pursue, through waking and slumber?"
"I seek one face alone on my soul's arrival
At Hades' glimmering wharves, one divine survival!"
"Lo! she thy lost one it is, who in airs above thee
Urges thy faery sail with the lips that love thee!
She takes thy sore heart hence, and shall heal its bruises
Far in the deathless country, the land of Muses. . . . "

IV

Glory unto thee, high Beauty, light in the drearness,
Poised fragility, pure with the spirit's clearness!
Strengths ungauged, unguessed, in thy petals shining
Blown from the deeps of God through the heart divining.
Again and again for ever to Beauty returning
Back must the eyes revert, and the lips be yearning.
Panting we pause, for a sibylline whisper reigneth;
By its perfection only the song enchaineth.
Here at the tempest's core is that windless zone
Of poise. . . . Here the wave of Beauty, spreading its tone
Bell-like, the light Uranian, ringing unknown
Wider than the wave ethereal, murmurs alone. . . .





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