Music
I LISTEN to the accents of the silver corded harp,
And tho’ aweary of the darts at me by malice hurl’d,
Allying goes life’s shuttle and aflying woof and warp—
A renovated soul I seek to renovate the world.
As the spring is to tire brooklet bound in winter’s icy chain,
As the shower is to the blossom parch’d by summer’s hottest
breath;
As sleep is to the body bow’d by toil and rack’d by pain,
So is music to this heart to whom the jars of life are death.
The bonds in which I’m bound are broken by its magic power,
And the pent up founts of feeling flow in looks and acts that
please;
And refreshened as the lily is refreshened by the shower,
The soul from trouble freed in turn the frame from trouble frees.
Nay, not alone from trouble freed—alone by pleasure fill’d—
Not alone to strength of body and to peace of mind restored;
I’m thrill’d and by a feeling that the ancients may have thrill’d
When they sang the golden truths and taught what later
times ignored.
Taught by the glamour under which I labour bright and clear,
Become to me the darkest legends of an elder day;
And the so-called myths thus said or sung by bards illumined,
wear
The colours which the True itself and not the False array.
’Tis said that to the Amphionic song, sun-like, up-rose
The Hundred-Gated City, and howe’er this be I know
At music’s touch a tower-girt citadel my spirit glows,
Thro’ whose illumined corridors no hydra-doubt may go.
Not mine to under-go what under-went Arion, yet
From out a darker sea, the waters of affliction caught,
And on a brighter than a Tenarian shore I’m set
To marvel at the miracle a melody has wrought.
Not mine Orpheus-like, the gift to strike the lyre and chant
What from another Pluto had another captive charmed;
But mine to know a lesser gift has made despair to grant
What Plato’s gruesome regions had a place of pleasure form’d.
Nay, not a feeler merely but an actor keen am I,
Empower’d to seize the harp of life and from its cords to bring
An anthem such as had compelled Apollo’s self to sigh,
And wrung from him the palm Marsyas tried in vain to wring.
Away into the regions of delight and, what is more,
Away into the regions of the inner life I’m borne
To learn how Nature at one birth both light and music bore,
And how the planets danced and sung upon Creation’s morn.
A dream of a lost paradise the Rosicrucians held
This twin of light and one that light-like points the fount superne
From which the glories that enshrine the universes well’d,
And whence but sprang the soul a spark, a planet to return.
At this the world may laugh and laugh; their jibes are spent in
vain,—
I stand above and far above the arrows at me flung:—
So chant I music-fired—and whatever worth my strain,
For men of brain, not stocks and stones, for men of brain ’tis
sung.
Other works by Joseph Skipsey...
