DARTMOUTH ODE
Unto your high behest this summer hour
What answer has the poet? how shall he frame his lay?
II
THEME
"What shall my song rehearse?" I said
To a wise bard, whose hoary head
Is bowed, like Kearsarge crouching low
Beneath a winter weight of snow,
But whose songs of passion, joy, or scorn,
Within a fiery heart are born.
"What can I spread, what proper feast
For these young Magi of the East?
What wisdom find, what mystic lore,
What chant they have not heard before?
Strange words of old has every tongue
Those happy cloistered hills among;
For each riddle I divine
They can answer me with nine;
Their footsteps by the Muse are led,
Their lips on Plato's honey fed;
Their eyes have skill to read the page
Of Theban bard or Attic sage;
For them all Nature's mysteries,—
The deep-down secrets of the seas,
The cyclone's whirl, the lightning's shock,
The language of the riven rock;
They know the starry sisters seven,—
What clouds the molten suns enfold,
And all the golden woof of heaven
Unravelled in their lens behold!
Gazing in a thousand eyes,
So rapt and clear, so wonder-wise,
What shall my language picture, then,
Beyond their wont—that has not reached their ken?
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