INSPIRATION
A poet sang of human things,
Of gorgeous queens and mighty kings,
And gems that glisten;
He praised the brassy front of show,
The ruby’s fire and diamond’s glow,
Yet none would listen.
He wove him many labored rimes
Of ended days and coming times,
Of deeds that stirred him;
He wrote of pomp and circumstance,
The flap of flag, the light of lance,
But no one heard him.
And thus he learned to know the pain
Of him who sings but sings in vain
To ears averted,
Like one who wakes his sweetest tone
To unresponsive walls of stone
In halls deserted.
When all the merry melodies
He sang his fellow men to please
Brought none to hear him,
He turned from splendor and from pelf
To sing a measure for himself,
A song to cheer him.
He wrote a song of long ago—
A vale where yellow lilies grow
Beside a river,
A path that leads the weary feet
Where meadowland and waters meet
And rushes quiver.
He wrote a song of childhood days,
Of pleasant shade and wooded ways
And summer quiet—
A bridge that spanned a gushing rill,
A humble cot upon a hill,
With roses by it.
’Twas not the creature of his art,
This song upwelling from his heart
In moments lonely;
With memory his eyes grew dim,
For then his own soul sang to him,
The poet only.
But other mortals heard his tale
Of woodland path and verdant vale
To heaven winging,
And men who scorned his song before
Sought out the poet’s open door
To hear him singing.
Thus came to him his mistress Fame,
Clad in her aureole of flame
And smile supernal;
No more a fleeting vision now,
She placed upon the singer’s brow
The kiss eternal.
And then the poet, fool and sage,
Turned gently from his written page,
While bravos thundered,
And, when he saw the listening throng
Of those who once had spurned his song,
He greatly wondered.