THE POET'S EUTHANASIA

Cloked in gray threadbare poverty, and blind,

Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God;

High-heartedness to long repulse resign'd,

Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trod

The sunless skyless streets he could not see;

By those faint feet made sacrosanct to me.

Yet on that laureate brow the sign he wore

Of Phoebus’ wrath; who,— for his favourite child,

When war and faction raised their rancorous roar,

Leagued with fanatic frenzy, blood-defiled,

To the sweet Muses and himself untrue,—

Around the head he loved thick darkness threw.

— He goes:— But with him glides the Pleiad throng

Of that imperial line, whom Phoebus owns

His ownest: for, since his, no later song

Has soar'd, as wide-wing'd, to the diadem'd thrones

That, in their inmost heaven, the Muses high

Set for the sons of immortality.

Most loved, most lovely, near him as he went,

Vergil: and He, supremest for all time,

In hoary blindness:— But the sweet lament

Of Lesbian love, the Parian song sublime,

Follow'd:— and that stern Florentine apart

Cowl'd himself dark in thought, within his heart

Nursing the dream of Church and Caesar's State,

Empire and Faith:— while Fancy's favourite child,

The myriad-minded, moving up sedate

Beckon'd his countryman, and inly smiled:—

Then that august Theophany paled from view,

To higher stars drawn up, and kingdoms new.