 | The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman |  |
TO BAYARD TAYLOR
WITH A COPY OF THE ILIAD
Bayard, awaken not this music strong,While round thy home the indolent sweet breeze
Floats lightly as the summer breath of seas
O'er which Ulysses heard the Sirens' song.
Dreams of low-lying isles to June belong,
And Circe holds us in her haunts of ease;
But later, when these high ancestral trees
Are sere, and such melodious languors wrong
The reddening strength of the autumnal year,
Yield to heroic words thy ear and eye;—
212
The trumpets' blare, the Argive battle-cry,
And see Achilles hurl his hurtling spear,
And mark the Trojan arrows make reply!
| The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman | |