University of Virginia Library

TO LEWIS MORRIS, K. B.

To thee I fly, O latest
Of all our Cymric Bards and greatest,
Robed in a royal dress;
And to the noble art
Yet nobler fashioned, through the falsehoods rifted
By the same touch and strong wise gentleness,
And lordly lifted
As to a heaven of bliss and blue.
For thou hast poured the passion and the heart
Of earth and sky
And all eternity
Into thy calm white temple, sober
With conscious grandeur and the secret clue
To every cosmic riddle.
Roses of June, red berries of October,
The reverend uses of the larger times
Which rang the everlasting chimes;
Not the loud modern scranny fiddle
Of patriots paid
To twang their loyal aid,
And tunes more fitted for the tavern;
High privileges, now the people's wont,
Once kept like treasures in a cavern
By dragon powers to grace the gilded front
Of titled greed and languid lust;
The universe of hope and fear
Orbed in the compass of an unshed tear,
With woman's warm deliciousness
And lily loveliness
Of pure and perfect trust;
Ripe memories of old actions rich and stately
When men were gods and walked sedately
Within a brighter broader land,
Honoured and honourable, deeming
The life more precious than a perjured seeming
And duty the one sure demand;—
All these and many more, the numbers
Wherein thou movest to the melody
Part of all truth and fair philosophy,
While the dull jangler of the current jargon
Who bleats of oily platitudes or “argon”
Reels off his vulgar rant and drinks and slumbers.
But the Parnassian dew is
For ever fresh and fragrant
On thee, O Lewis;
And thy serene and certain note,
The hand which never wrote
When too audacious and too vagrant
A vile or vicious word,
Is only seen and heard
Among the chaste and choicer paths
Of classic heights and deeps
And golden aftermaths—
It nowise halts and sleeps
Nor riots in the orgies rude,
But keeps unstained its own sweet solitude.
To thee I gladly fly,
O'ercumbered with the crude mortality
For ever with us now,
From sordid flesh
Which laves in public sores to sin afresh—
The omnipresent world, the sodden brow
Of lechery that sprawls and spumes at length
In bestial strength—
The harlot raptures of the sexy novels
Wherein the female rake unbosomed grovels
With every kind of ugly antic,
Naked and frantic
And not ashamed,
To find her proper level
In dancing to the devil,
Unblushing and unblamed.
Lord of two worlds, who dost from singing sires
Hand down the imperishable fires
And at thy blest perpetual altar
Burn incense meet,
Without which earth had not been half so sweet
Nor heaven so glad;
Thou didst not in thy wildest wanderings palter,
As others lightly had,
With purity and faith
And the eternal laws of right and wrong,
For any passing wraith
However crowned with garlic and renown'd,
In thy calm silver song.
In thee I see, no dallying with the dark
And pleasures hidden, by æsthetics chidden,
To all but gutter bards forbidden;
But our high water-mark,
Consummate, pure,
Of living literature,
And God's accomplished plan
The flower of every culture
(Not that which feeds on carrion like a vulture),
The scholar and the Christian gentleman.
Here my last refuge lies,
Away from worship of the body
And educated shame and shoddy,
Which breaks our decent ties
And boasts that we (however white the shirt
Or sham) are chiefly dirt.
Thou knowest better,
Morris, and long our one unstainèd Knight
Of chosen chivalry,
Hast shown thyself we have no kind of fetter
Short of Divinity
Our dwelling-place and glory and delight.
I roam among thy classic bowers
And pluck the lotus
Or asphodel,
And hail thee as a Seer on tranquil towers
Above the Night and Notus,
A solitary sentinel.
Thine eye is on the morning, and thy feet
Outside the shade and shock
Tread bases of the Rock
Which anchors to the Infinite;
Thy prophet glances greet,
Beyond the writhings and the babble
Of all this pessimistic rabble,
The good, the sure, the sweet, the exquisite.
No mincings and no maulings
In thy clear leisured lofty verse,
No prurient prattle and no bludgeoned Truth
And efforts which asperse
The thing they fain would bless, no caterwaulings
Of crapulous gray youth
Seeking it knows not what, a maid, the moon,
And fitter for the cudgel and the spoon
To stay its idiot cry,
Than the most gentle art of Poesy.
I find no refuge in our English Prose,
But affectations, irritations,
And popinjays' green pullulations;
No march of thought to its predestined close
Inevitably reached just by mere stress
Of grace and reason its ally,
An ordered pomp of tunefulness
And mere necessity.
Instead I meet but sound divorced from sense,
And marriages of words not fated
Or fixed in heaven but all mismated,
Blunders and ignorance prepense,
Adulterous unions and illicit matches
Of ill-assorted pairs and patches,
And fustian trimmed with purple lace,
The ornaments that are a clothing
For nastiness or nothing,
And pimples hid not by the powdered face.
In thee I have fair form, good measure,
That unlearned instinct of eternal fitness,
The soft assurance which bears witness
To the true master's strong unerring touch,
And wakes at pleasure
But will not overmuch
The tear or laughter.
And in thy chastened and divine content
I gain my own, and a new continent
Of hope and rest; I cannot grieve in
The doubts of dimness, but believe in
Myself and all things here and God's Hereafter.