| |
| THEY tell you the poet is useless and empty the sound of his lyre, | |
| That science has made him a phantom, and thinned to a shadow his fire: | |
| Yet reformer has never demolished a dungeon or den of the foe | |
| But the flame of the soul of a poet pulsated in every blow. | |
| |
| They tell you he hinders with tinklings, with gags from an obsolete stage, | 5 |
| The dramas of deed and the worship of Laws in a practical age: | |
| But the deeds of to-day are the children of magical dreams he has sung, | |
| And the Laws are ineffable Fires that from niggardly heaven he wrung! | |
| |
| The bosoms of women he sang of are heaving to-day in our maids: | |
| The God that he drew from the Silence our woes or our weariness aids: | 10 |
| Not a maxim has needled through Time, but a poet had feathered its shaft, | |
| Not a law is a boon to the people but he has dictated its draft. | |
| |
| And why do we fight for our fellows? For Liberty why do we long? | |
| Because with the core of our nerve-cells are woven the lightnings of song! | |
| For the poet for ages illumined the animal dreams of our sires, | 15 |
| And his Thought-Become-Flesh is the matrix of all our unselfish desires! | |
| |
| Yea, why are we fain for the Beautiful? Why should we die for the Right? | |
| Because through the forested æons, in spite of the priests of the Night, | |
| Undeterred by the faggot or cross, uncorrupted by glory or gold, | |
| To our mothers the poet his Vision of Goodness and Beauty has told. | 20 |
| |
| When, comrades, we thrill to the message of speaker in highway or hall, | |
| The voice of the poet is reaching the silenter poet in all: | |
| And again, as of old, when the flames are to leap up the turrets of Wrong, | |
| Shall the torch of the New Revolution be lit from the words of a Song! | |
| |
