University of Virginia Library

A PAGEANT OF POETS

FROM Landor to Swinburne

PRELUDE

THE PAGEANT

6
W. S. LANDOR

Foremost was Landor found,
His leonine mien with Attic charm subdued,
Supreme in sculptured verse, and radiant prose
Encroaching on its sister's narrower bound;
In every clime and scene his gathering ground—
City and camp and cloistral solitude;
His range the world, a cameo, or a rose.
He held a mirror to all mood and thought,
And, ere it fled, each swift reflection caught
Of poet, statesman, courtesan, and sage.
The art of Life, the life of Art, he scanned
And moulded as the potter to his hand:—
The life of Athens in its golden age:—
Of Tuscan gardens, under rambling bines
Repeopled with Boccaccio's Florentines:—
Of Arden before Shakespeare stormed the stage.

7
R. SOUTHEY

Then followed him who sang,
Mid Greta's murmurings, of Domdaniel caves
Sunk in the spellbound waves;—
Madoc who earliest past unfurrowed seas
On virgin shores with the Red Dragon sprang;
And wondrous lays of grim Mythologies
Spun on the shuttle of Kehama's curse:
Who dowered the heroes of his cosmic verse
With the inherent virtues of his soul—
Faith, valour, fortitude, and self-control:
Who first, since Dryden, caught the laurel spray
From dull, belittling foreheads, smirched and torn,
And, shredding its long shrivelled leaves away,
Revived it in the fountains of the Morn.

8
S. T. COLERIDGE

The Dreamer next behold,
Coleridge, with introspective gaze sublime,
Whose ripe imaginings,
Within one matchless English summer-time,
Burst in a triple flower of flame and gold,
Unfurling splendid petals fold from fold,
Vivid with hues of stormy sunsettings
And sea-snakes' burnished scales,
And darting stamens palpitant like wings
Into the dazzled air,
Yet fading under Evening's falling veils
To phosphorescent flowers unearthly fair,
And by the moonlight blanched to phantom things.
So leapt his soul aflare,
But from that prodigality of bloom
Recoiled with flameless lamp burnt out and bare
Of song, as one whom his own thoughts consume.

9
W. WORDSWORTH

Then Wordsworth passed with Nature-reading eyes,
The ‘Visionary Gleam’ at last assured.
Suckled and reared at mothering mountain breasts
And cradled mid their drifting lullabies,
The fells and streams grew playmates to the child—
His intimate touch endured,
And bared their secrets to his high behests
Or gay endearments as he roamed the wild.
Then, in the flush of manhood's conquering pride,
He thrust their final, reticent mask aside,
And saw within, in fitful, fleeting gleams—
As through a furnace grate
Opening and closing on its fiery spate—
The incandescent caverns of the Earth
Where the unborn and spent millenniums wait,
And ravished thence hidden, immortal dreams
Of life beyond the bounds of death and birth.

10
SIR WALTER SCOTT

Up the long path of Fame
See Scott advance, pure clarion of the band,
Supremest bearer of his Country's name,
Rekindling the deserted Border-land
With sudden gleam of spears and hurtling swords
Glinting behind bare crags or tufts of fern:
Gay pennons streaming up the winding glen;
Sacked towers aglow with lurid cores of flame,
Or broken armies trampling through the fords,
Shedding a trail of writhing steeds and men
From stricken fields—Flodden or Bannockburn.
Above the placid breasts of mountain lakes
The pibroch swells; lights kindle on the shore;
The Fiery Cross its blinding pathway breaks,
And the wild Clansmen toss the torch of war.

11
LORD BYRON

Breaking the prison of an alien star
Like thine own rebel angels, earthward drawn
Toward signal flares of Dawn,
Byron, thy wild, dissentient spirit fell,
On tempest-buffeted pinions tossed afar,
With spheral music chiming in its bell:
Yet found no refuge from the shadowing bolt
In Passion's arms, or any languorous shade,
Nor banished from the riot of its revolt
Thought of the heaven wherefrom its flight had strayed.
Yet for the ransom paid
Of life, Apollo, that thy Greece might rise
Freed from the Moslem chain,
Accept the sacrifice,
Accept the varying strain
Though to the Night its strenuous chants belong—
Though to the Night its pain,—
Though to the Night the travail of its cries:
Accept the lone, unconquerable song!

12
P. B. SHELLEY

And thou too, truant from the ranks of light,
Capturing in Shelley's soul thy transient home
As refuge from the phantoms of the night—
Near kinsman of the flower-drift and the foam
And fragile beings fugitive from sight
Haunting the hills, the forests, and the sea
About the Ægean isles and Italy,—
Suffused with thee, in his rare brain awoke
Vision and insight beyond mortal ken
Of elemental tragedies and woes;
Prometheus strangling in the Eternal yoke
Up the Caucasian, lightning-smitten glen,
Fast in his torments' throes;
Laon upon his column, and the crime
Of that abhorrent sire, accursed of Time.
Thine too the ultimate waft, the culminant sweep
Of rapture up the steep
Of the cloud-rack, revelling with winds and birds;
Till winds and waters noosed thee, drowned with sleep,
And quenched his flaming heart and springing words.

13
JOHN KEATS

Not writ in water only, but in fire
Across the climbing parapets of cloud
That mask our English skies,
Proud mid the nobly proud,
Keats, glow thy name's immortal; thine the lyre
Strung at the curved mouth of an ocean shell
Alluring there the sea-winds' wandering sighs,
The waves' antiphonies,
Whence issuing at thy will, or low or loud,
The soul of Beauty snares men with her spell.
Though thou unto the elder gods art gone,—
Unthroned, discarded,—in their starless vale
Shining among them like Hyperion,
On thee hath Time no hold, so earthly frail,
For, Adonais, on the surgent crest
Of song, the grief and glory of thee are blown
Through heaven in strains as soaring as thine own.
Still thy receding voice the nightingale,
Deep in the brooding thicket's shadowy nest,
Remembers in each midnight of its June;
Whenever Art revives the harmonies
Of Attic life and grace on plinth or frieze
Thine are the unageing lips that flute the tune.

14
ROBERT BROWNING

The poet of the towering intellect
Lit late upon his fame, but doth abide
On the sheer crag with vivid mosses flecked
Whereby the kestrel's wafting pinions ride,—
Not further from the greatest than one stride.
He, even as Cleon in his island shrine,
From every Art its quintessence distilled;
Then in the seething caldron of his thought,
Turbid from grim endeavour half-fulfilled,
With each infusion wrought
The miracle of water turned to wine,
Sealed in its flask, matured, and clarified.
He too, within the brain's voluted coil
Appraised each duct and fibre that impel
Men toward the heaven or hell
They fashion out of life with endless toil;
Following the devious tracks by which they wind
Toward ends foredoomed and unescapable;
Lord of the analytics of the Mind.

15
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Yet not alone he stands; his arms embrace
A weakling woman with a seraph's face
And love and pity in her tender eyes;
Dowered with rare dreams wherewith the gods endue
Heroic souls in tremulous ecstasies:
Whose spirit's frail, declining tenement
The immitigable music eddying through
Left torrent-swept and spent.
First, thin and sweet her virginal singing rang
As that of any sprite or summer bird
Lilting, at dawn, of Elemental things,
Yet soon with sadness blent;
By her own handsel of pain made free as air
Of all the zones of anguish and despair.
Then Love flew nigh and brushed her with his wings,
And twined her maiden bower
With the late glories of the Passion-flower,
And from her heart that chant of passion sprang
Which left the world no lovelier afterword
But gave her brow the doubled aureole
Of Browning's wife and Shelley's sister-soul.

16
LORD TENNYSON

Master, within the Palace of thine Art,
Built to the incantations of thy brain
And poised in air upon a golden chain,
A hundred radiant chambers hoard thy dreams.
In one, the spell-bound maid's arrested heart
Thrills to the step that tip-toes on the floors
Bringing her ecstasy of life again.
Here old Ulysses stems the ocean streams,
Trimming his tattered sail toward fabulous shores
With the thin remnant of his storm-tossed crew,
And constant in the grapple of the oars,
To seek “the great Achilles whom they knew”.
There drifts the dead Elaine with her dumb guard
Up the slow tide, a flower by Fortune marred.
Here, lost in muted cloisters, Guinevere
Prays on while Arthur spurs to his last fight:
Beyond the reed-beds of the wailing mere
The sword Excalibur is caught from sight.
And fleet and hushed the fugitive phantoms throng,
Snared in the meshes of thy magic song,
As through dissolving halls of dream we grope
To those twin shrines, lit with no earthly light,
Where Galahad clasps the handles of the Grail,
And thy lone craft, without an oar or sail,
Drifts out upon the tideway of the night,
Toward the dim beacon of a far-seen hope.

17
MATTHEW ARNOLD

Arnold, clear voice of melancholy doubt,
Wedded to thought and word serene as rills
Brimming a Vestal's well down beds of sand,
Perchance even now thou haunt'st the Cumner hills
Unvexed in dreams by the Philistian rout,
With Thyrsis' self redeemed from Arno's strand,
And that lone Scholar for thy company,
Heedless of faint-heard chimes in Oxford towers
Beneath thy trysting tree,
Unconscious of the burdens of the hours,
In ghostly evening gardens gathering
For Proserpine the pale, faint blooms of Spring.
Far from the sorrowful dirges of the sea
In Faith's extremity,
And wind-bleached mountain passes grey with dole,
Where not a root may cling
As anchor for the soul,
Let the great winds to the great tides go down:
The anguish of the world has passed from thee;
Thou hast achieved thy crown.

18
D. G. ROSSETTI

Painter and poet, betwixt whose easel and page
Flits to and fro one mirrored, sensuous face—
Hers who resigned thee from the grave's embrace
Thy heart of hoarded melody and flame,—
Back-straying wanderer from that earlier age
Glorious with Dante's and Giotto's fame,
When Art, reborn, drank at the fount of Truth,
How hast thou lit our frigid Northern tongue
With palpitating songs of love and ruth
As when that Art was young!
Of love that deems the world upon its knees
For one enraptured hour, then stills its breath,
Shuddering beneath the swooping wings of Death,
And rakes thenceforth the dust of memories:
Of love, by lust or treachery overthrown:
Of love, turned hate, that works by sorcerers' charms
To wreck the thing erst cherished in its arms:
Of love that cannot make its heaven alone.

19
WILLIAM MORRIS

Not so; the palaces of Song endure:
When Time hath set his fluttering captive free,
There reigns the soul, remote, intact, secure,
In its own fabric of Eternity.

A. C. SWINBURNE

26
L'ENVOI

Waking, aloft a waxen moon rode high
Amid the still battalions of the sky.
About me, drowsy odours of the Spring:
A sense of uncouth watchers vanishing.