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(From Columbus)
I KNOW not when this hope enthralled me first, | |
| But from my boyhood up I loved to hear | |
| The tall pine-forests of the Apennine | |
| Murmur their hoary legends of the sea, | |
| Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld | 5 |
| The sudden dark of tropic night shut down | |
| O’er the huge whisper of great watery wastes, | |
| The while a pair of herons trailingly | |
| Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled | |
| The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms | 10 |
| Far through a gulf’s green silence, never scarred | |
| By any but the North-wind’s hurrying keels. | |
| And not the pines alone; all sights and sounds | |
| To my world-seeking heart paid fealty, | |
| And catered for it as the Cretan bees | 15 |
| Brought honey to the baby Jupiter, | |
| Who in his soft hand crushed a violet, | |
| Godlike foremusing the rough thunder’s gripe; | |
| Then did I entertain the poet’s song, | |
| My great Idea’s guest, and, passing o’er | 20 |
| That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell, | |
| I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains | |
| Whose adamantine links, his manacles, | |
| The western main shook growling, and still gnawed; | |
| I brooded on the wise Athenian’s tale | 25 |
| Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne’s keel | |
| Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore: | |
| For I believed the poets; it is they | |
| Who utter wisdom from the central deep, | |
| And, listening to the inner flow of things, | 30 |
| Speak to the age out of eternity. | |
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