Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/235

THE POET 215 �Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled, Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home, Lit by the wan light of the horned moon, The swift and silent lizard of the stones ! �But stay ! these walls these ivy-clad arcades �These mouldering plinths these sad and blackened shafts �These vague entablatures this crumbling frieze �These shattered cornices this wreck this ruin �These stones alas ! these grey stones are they all �All of the famed and the colossal left �By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me? �"Not all" the Echoes answer me "not all ! �Prophetic sounds and loud, arise forever �From us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise, �As melody from Memnon to the Sun. �We rule the hearts of mightiest men we rule �With a despotic sway all giant minds. �We are not impotent we pallid stones. �Not all our power is gone not all our fame �Not all the magic of our high renown �Not all the wonder that encircles us �Not all the mysteries that in us lie �Not all the memories that hang upon �And cling around about us as a garment, �Clothing us in a robe of more than glory." �TO ONE IN PARADISE (1834) �[The refrain of The Raven may be glimpsed through a translucent rather than transparent veil in the thrice repeated "no more" of these lines and in the recurrence of the same words in the Sonnet To Zante (1837) and the Sonnet Silence (1840). The poem occurs in the short story called The Assignation. Four years after Poe's death, he was accused of purloining the lines from Tennyson, but the laureate promptly set the matter right.] �Thou wast all that to me, love, �For which my soul did pine A green isle in the sea, love, �A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, �And all the flowers were mine. ��� �