| |
| SNATCH the departing mood; | |
| Make yours its emptying reed, and pipe us still | |
| Faith in the time, faith in our common blood, | |
| Faith in the least of good: | |
| Song cannot fail if these its spirits fill! | 5 |
| |
| What if your heritage be | |
| The huddled trees along the smoky ways; | |
| At a street’s end the stretch of lilac sea; | |
| The vender, swart but free, | |
| Crying his yellow wares across the haze? | 10 |
| |
| Your verse awaits you there; | |
| For Love is Love though Latin swords be rust, | |
| The keen Greek driven from gossipping mall and square; | |
| And Care is still but Care | |
| Though Homer and his seven towns are dust. | 15 |
| |
| Thus Beauty lasts, and, lo! | |
| Now Proserpine is barred from Enna’s hills, | |
| The flower she plucked yet makes an April show, | |
| Sets some town still a-glow, | |
| And yours the Vision of the Daffodils. | 20 |
| |
| The Old-World folk knew not | |
| More surge-like sounds than urban winters bring | |
| Up from the wharves at dusk to every spot; | |
| And no Sicilian plot | |
| More fire than heaps our tulips in the spring. | 25 |
| |
| Strait is the road of Song, | |
| And they that be the last are oft the first; | |
| Fret not for fame; the years are kind though long; | |
| You, in the teasing throng, | |
| May take all time with one shrewd lyric burst. | 30 |
| |
| Be reverend and know | |
| Ill shall not last, or waste the ploughëd land; | |
| Or creeds sting timid souls; and naught at all, | |
| Whatever else befall, | |
| Can keep us from the hollow of God’s hand. | 35 |
| |
| Let trick of words be past; | |
| Strict with the thought, unfearful of the form, | |
| So shall you find the way and hold it fast, | |
| The world hear, at the last, | |
| The horns of morning sound above the storm. | 40 |
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