Extremes of nature reconciled, Bereaved a tyrant of his will, He shall not seek to weave, Wait his returning strength. Bird, that from the nadir's floor To the zenith's top can soar, The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that journey's length. Nor profane affect to hit Or compass that, by meddling wit, Which only the propitious mind There are open hours When the God's will sallies free, And the dull idiot might see The flowing fortunes of a thousand years; Sudden, at unawares, Self-moved, fly-to the doors, Nor sword of angels could reveal What they conceal. MERLIN II THE rhyme of the poet To every foot its antipode; Each color with its counter glowed; Flavor gladly blends with flavor; Each with all propitious time Like the dancer's ordered band, Or else alternated; Adding by their mutual gage, One to other, health and age. Solitary fancies go Short-lived wandering to and fro, Most like to bachelors, Or an ungiven maid, Not ancestors, With no posterity to make the lie afraid, Or keep truth undecayed. Perfect-paired as eagle's wings, Justice is the rhyme of things; Trade and counting use The self-same tuneful muse; And Nemesis, Who with even matches odd, BRING me wine, but wine which never grew In the belly of the grape, Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through Under the Andes to the Cape, Suffered no savor of the earth to scape. Let its grapes the morn salute From a nocturnal root, Which feels the acrid juice Of Styx and Erebus; And turns the woe of Night, By its own craft, to a more rich delight. We buy ashes for bread; We buy diluted wine; Give me of the true, Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled Among the silver hills of heaven, Draw everlasting dew; Wine of wine, Blood of the world, Form of forms, and mould of statures, That I intoxicated, And by the draught assimilated, May float at pleasure through all natures; The bird-language rightly spell, And that which roses say so well. Wine that is shed Like the torrents of the sun Up the horizon walls, Or like the Atlantic streams, which run When the South Sea calls. Water and bread, Food which needs no transmuting, Food which teach and reason can. Wine which Music is, Music and wine are one, That I, drinking this, Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; Kings unborn shall walk with me; And the poor grass shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man. Quickened so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock. I thank the joyful juice Winds of remembering Of the ancient being blow, And seeming-solid walls of use Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine; Vine for vine be antidote, And the grape requite the lote! Reason in Nature's lotus drenched, The memory of ages quenched; Let wine repair what this undid; Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures with the pen Upon the tablets blue, The dancing Pleiads and eternal men. GRACE How much, Preventing God! how much I owe To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below, MEROPS WHAT care I, so they stand the same,- How long the power to give them name Thus far to-day your favors reach, |