We singers standing on the outer rim,
Who touch the fringe of poesy at times
With half-formed thoughts, rough-set in halting rhymes,
Through which no airy flights of fancy skim—
We write just so, an hour to while away,
And turn the well-thumbed stock still o’er and o’er,
As men have done a thousand times before,
And will again, just as we do to-day.
We have no fire to set men’s brains aglow;
We have no tune to set the world a-swing;
There is no throb within the songs we sing
To flush the heart where passions ebb and flow.
We have no master’s hand to strike the keys;
We lay no claim at all to bardic bays,
But write (for coin) our topic-tinctured lays
And come, and go, like any evening breeze.
But I, for one, would never weep the lack
Of monumental works, and noble themes,
But rest content by slopes where Demos dreams
And leave Parnassus’ heights upon my back,
If I could write (as any man should write)
About the world within my garden wall,
And never dream inspired dreams at all
To live still on when I had sought the night.
If I could take that rosebud from its stem
And weave its petals in a simple rhyme,
So you could hear the bells of springtime chime,
And you could see the flower-soul in them—
Or else, we’ll say, a magpie on a limb,
Greeting the sunrise with its matin song—
To catch the music as it floats along,
And link its spirit to a bush-child’s hymn.
Or if—but, then, the limitations rise
Like barriers across the mental plain,
And mists and things obscure the rhymer’s brain
And dull his ears, and cloud his blinking eyes.
And so we write as Nature sets her gauge—
No worse than most, and better, p’raps, than some,
But should a man remain for ever dumb
When only rhythm fills his aimless page?