The critics say that epics have died out With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods— I’ll not believe it. I could never dream As Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineer Who travelled higher than he was born to live, And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat Discoursing of an image seen through fog,) That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned grey Like any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front; And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plume As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All men are possible heroes: every age, Heroic in proportions, double-faced, Looks backward and before, expects a morn And claims an epos. Ay, but every age Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle) Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours! The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip: A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed; An age of scum, spooned off the richer past; An age of patches for old gaberdines; An age of mere transition, meaning nought, Except that what succeeds must shame it quite, If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind, And wrong thoughts make poor poems. Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed, To some colossal statue of a man: The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear, Had guessed as little of any human form Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats. They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles off Or ere the giant image broke on them, Full human profile, nose and chin distinct, Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky, And fed at evening with the blood of suns; Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetually The largesse of a silver river down To all the country pastures. ’Tis even thus With times we live in,—evermore too great To be apprehended near. But poets should Exert a double vision; should have eyes To see near things as comprehensively As if afar they took their point of sight, And distant things, as intimately deep, As if they touched them. Let us strive for this. I do distrust the poet who discerns No character or glory in his times, And trundles back his soul five hundred years, Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court, Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads Alive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable; But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter, Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen, As dead as must be, for the greater part, The poems made on their chivalric bones. And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.