University of Virginia Library

previous section A pageant of poets and other poems
next section
59

APOLOGIA

I

Poet, leave your lonely height;
Tempests rack the wold;
Shapes of fear bestride the night
And the stars are cold.
Tread at times the common paths
By the hedgerow side,
Where, between the falling swathes,
Field-mice slip and hide.
Give us flame to warm the hands,
Not to scorch the byre;
'Tis not lightning life demands;—
Friendly, lambent fire.
Make yourself to many men
What you are to one;—
Singing water down the glen:
Radiance of the sun.
Though high Heaven be yours at will,
Prize the country lane;
Let your rainbow ladder still
Clutch of Earth retain.
Thus, among Admetus' hinds
Young Apollo roved;
Carolled with the morning winds;
Saved the queen he loved.

II

I would not sing divorced, by choice,
From all the woodland yields,
Fleeting, a disembodied voice,
In air above the fields.
60

My heart regards and holds them all;—
The tints of drifting leaves;
The moss and frondage on the wall;
The nest beneath the eaves;
But by the gate on which I swung,
The dells in which I played,
The paths are closed and barbs are strung;
Nature is leased to Trade.
The canker of the quarry scores
The spinney from the hills,
And down the twinkling trout-stream pours
The acid of the mills.
On all the jostling roads that thrust
Toward every jaded town,
There is but space for speed and dust;
Dreamers are trampled down.
Wherefore I hide, perforce, apart
Upon my hill of cloud,
From them who would but spurn my heart
Or toss it to the crowd;—
Content to sing, content to dream
Out of the moil and daze;
Unseen, unheard, far from the stream
And frenzy of the ways;—
Content while here the voices blend
Of rills and woods below,—
The stars shine in, the birds ascend,
The Morning's clarions blow.
previous section A pageant of poets and other poems
next section