For once a poet sang of happiness,
But now, like running flame, glad voices say—
“Joy is the sheer antithesis of wrong.”
Enough,—and I, no longer comradeless,
Behold exultant on the world’s highway
Your being, and the proof of Pippa’s song.
VIII
When you are old and dancing shadows play
Around the sky-blown laughter in your eyes
Shall I, unworthy of your new disguise,
Forget the sacrament and go away?
Shall I adore, like sorrowed men to-day,
The child who gurgled in first ecstasies
At oxen (Mary said) that mooed surprise
And snuffed with wondering muzzles in the hay?
O leave the past—the living world is mine
Warm, passionate, and breathing. Even so
Shall Life in after years make Earth divine
And fire shall burn as long as embers glow.
But he who babbled to the wondering kine
Is dead, long dead, two thousand years ago.
KEATS
Touch me, O Lord, and let my sonnet ring
With echoes. Now his words of crowned belief
In raging hours of pain and suffering
Too high for praise, too terrible for grief,
Ring loud and clear. Last night his chariot rolled
And I beheld him urge amid the stars
Cloud-fashioned steeds of snow moon-aureoled,
Himself a charioteer equipped for wars.
Faster and faster—men of Blood and Pain
Opposed in vast battalions, but he
Rolled back their army to the dark again
And triumphed while he sang exultingly
As now he sings. Boy of the glowing brain,
Dear Keats your name is Paradise to me!