The horses neighed, their nostrils flaring,
And wet the metal bit with foam,
Then swift as arrows raced for home.
36
You mourn the poet, friends . . . and rightly:
Scarce out of infant clothes and killed!
Those joyous hopes that bloomed so brightly
Now doomed to wither unfulfilled!
Where now the ardent agitation,
The fine and noble aspiration
Of youthful feeling, youthful thought,
Exalted, tender, boldly wrought?
And where are stormy love's desires,
The thirst for knowledge, work, and fame,
The dread of vice, the fear of shame?
And where are you, poetic fires,
You cherished dreams of sacred worth
And pledge of life beyond this earth!
37
It may be he was born to fire
The world with good, or earn at least
A gloried name; his silenced lyre
Might well have raised, before it ceased,
A call to ring throughout the ages.
Perhaps, upon the world's great stages,
He might have scaled a lofty height.
His martyred shade, condemned to night,
Perhaps has carried off forever
Some sacred truth, a living word,
Now doomed by death to pass unheard;
And in the tomb his shade shall never
Receive our race's hymns of praise,
Nor hear the ages bless his days.
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Or maybe he was merely fated
To live amid the common tide;
And as his years of youth abated,
The flame within him would have died.
In time he might have changed profoundly,
Have quit the Muses, married soundly;
And in the country he'd have worn
A quilted gown and cuckold's horn,
And happy, he'd have learned life truly;
At forty he'd have had the gout,
Have eaten, drunk, grown bored and stout,
And so decayed, until he duly
Passed on in bed ... his children round,
While women wept and doctors frowned.
40
