The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Fortune! unloved of whom are those
On whom the Virtues smile,
Forbear the land I love, and choose,
Choose still some meaner isle!
Thy best of gifts are gilded chains;
The gold wears off; the bond remains.

Thus much of good, nor more, is thine,
That, clustering round the wand
Thou lift'st, with honey smeared and wine,
In that unqueenly hand,
Close-limed are trapped those sun-bred flies
Which else had swarmed about the wise.

354

The vanities of fleeting time
To powers that fleet belong;
They fear and hate the sons sublime
Of science and of song,
And those that, scorned as weak, o'errule
The strong, and keep the world at school.

For how could Song her tenderer notes
Elaborate for the ear
Of one on vulgar noise who doats;
Of one through deserts drear
On-rushing in that race distraught
Whose goad is hate, whose goal is naught?

And how could Science trust that line,
Her labyrinth's sacred clue,
Of subtly-woven thought, more fine
Than threads of morning dew,
To those unhallowed hands and coarse
The drudges base of greed or force?

Faith to the sensual and the proud
Whom this world makes her prey
But glimmers with the light allowed
To tapers at noonday;
When garish joys have ta'en their flight
Like stars she glorifies the night.

Nor less the Heroic Life extracts
From circumstance adverse
Her food of sufferings and of acts;
While pain, a rugged nurse,
On the rough breasts of wintry seas
Rocks it 'mid stormy lullabies.

355

Hail, Poor Estate! Through thee man's race
Partake, by rule controlled,
The praise of them discalced who pace,
And them that kneel white-stoled;
Where thou hast honours due, hard by
Obedience stands and Chastity.

Hail, too, O Bard, nor poor nor rich,
Whom one blue gleam of sea
Binds to our British Cuma's beach;
Our gold we store in thee;
To thee not wealth but worlds belong,
Like Delos raised; such might hath song!

Through thee to him who climbs that down
Arched onward toward the west,
White cliff, green shore, and stubble brown
In Idyl grace are dressed;
Beside low doors, a later Ruth,
Thy Dora sits—serene as truth.

Thy song can girdle hill and mead
With choirs, more pure, more fair,
Their locks with wild flower dressed and weed,
Than ever Hellas bare:
Theocritus, we cry, once more
Treads his beloved Trinacrian shore!

O long with freedom's gale refreshed,
With mild sea-murmurs lulled,
O long by thee, in cares unmeshed,
Those healthier flowers be culled
Rich Egypt knew not, nor the wain
That creaked o'er deep Bœotian plain!

356

They lit Arcadian peaks: they breathed—
Light soils have airs divine—
O'er Scio's rocks with ivy wreathed,
Stern Parnes' brow, and thine,
Pentelicus, whose marble womb
With temples crowned all-conquering Rome.

Teach us in all that round us lies
To see and feel each hour,
More than Homeric majesties,
And more than Phidian power:
Teach us the coasts of modern life
With lordlier tasks are daily rife

Than theirs who plunged the heroic oar
Of old by Chersonese:
But bid our Argo launch from shore
Unbribed by golden Fleece:
Bid us Dædalean arts to scorn
Which prostituted ends suborn!

That science—slave of sense—which claims
No commerce with the sky,
Is baser thrice than that which aims
With waxen wing to fly!
To grovel, or self-doomed to soar—
Mechanic age, be proud no more!

Lugano, October 7, 1856.

University of Virginia Library

ODE.

THE GOLDEN MEAN.