Fables in Song :: :: University of Virginia Library

Nature hath given the Stag a wondrous gift.
Love, and the force that loving hearts doth lift
To lofty courage by the sweet desire
Of winning love, have with creative fire
Gone to his burning brain, and thence burst out
In that brave crest he proudly bears about.
Thus, in love's complete beauty arm'd, he roams
The gusty realms of passion, and becomes
A living tempest; with whate'er in storm
Hath being—motion swift, majestic form,
Strife, rapture, peril, and the pomp of power.
Then, like the storm which hath its one wild hour
And passes, he—his passion once subdued
By surfeit fierce—returns to solitude.

2.

A Beetle, burrowing where a Stag had been,
Humm'd “Ha, brave buck! here hast thou left, I ween,

To me who live upon thy leavings, fine
And fit material for a crown like thine!
For I surmise, since matter's everywhere,
That everything is matter. Maidens, fair
And pure, I've seen, who stoop'd to pluck and place
(Charm'd by the beauty of it and the grace)
In that sweet haunt of the Hesperides,
The guardian of whose hidden apples is
Jealous Desire, some flow'ret haply fed
On the foul scrapings of the cattle-shed:
And, if such filth could into beauty bud,
Beauty, thou art but metamorphosed mud!
Eureka! Here must the Stag's secret lie.
Could I but catch it, doubtless also I
Should get the grace to which my soul aspires,
And sprout those horns the horn-mad world admires.”

3.

With which intent, on what he found he fed;
Till gradually from his insect head
The superfluity of matter there
Oozed out in frontal ornaments that were
Not all unlike the antlers of a stag.
Then, quite contented, he began to brag,
“A stag am I, and brave mine antlers be!”

4.

And yet he was but a stag-beetle, he.

MORAL.

The poet's form is to his followers known.
The poet's secret is the poet's own.
'Tis born and buried in the poet's soul:
Passion its prelude, solitude its goal.