One light cicada’s simmering cry,
Survivor of the summer heat,
Chimes faint; the robin, shrill and sweet,
Pipes from green holly; whilst from far
The rookery croaks reply,
Hoarse, deep, as veterans readying for war.
—Grief on a happier future dwells;
The happy present haunts the past;
And those old minstrels who outlast
Our looser-textured webs of song,
Nursed in Hellenic dells,
Sicilian, or Italian, hither throng.
Why care if Turk and Tartar fume,
Barbarian ’gainst barbarian set,
Or how our politic prophets fret,
When on this tapestry-thyme and heath,
Fresh work of Nature’s loom,
Thus, thus, we can diffuse ourselves, and breathe
Autumnal sparkling freshness?—while
The page by some bless’d miracle saved
When Goth and Frank ’gainst Hellas raved.
Paints how the wanderer-chief divine,
Snatch’d from Circaean guile,
Led by Nausicaa past Athéné’s shrine,
In that delicious garden sate
Where summer link’d to summer glows,
Grapes ever ripe, and rose on rose;
And all the wonders of thy tale
—O greatest of the great—
Whose splendour ne’er can fade, nor beauty fail!
Or by the city of God above
In rose-red meadows, where the day
Eternal burns, the bless’d ones stray;
The harp lets loose its silver showers
From the dark incense-grove;
And happiness blooms forth with all her flowers.
O Theban strain,—remote and pure,
Voice of the higher soul, that shames
Our downward, dry, material aims,
The bestial creed of earth-to-earth,—
Owning with insight sure
The signs that speak of Man’s celestial birth!
Or white Colonos here through green
Green Dorset winds his holy vale,
Where the divine deep nightingale
Heaps note on note and love on love,
In ivy thick unseen,
While goddesses with Dionysos rove.
Another music then we hear,
A cry from the Sicilian dell,
‘Here ’mid sweet grapes and laurel dwell;
Slips by from wood-girt Aetna’s dome
Snow-cold the stream and clear:—
Hither to me, come, Galataea, come!’