Then he made him wine—for it was the grape— And darkened its depths with a perilous spell, And gave it to man with the angel shape, When lo! a wonder and terror befell— Was it a wonder from Heaven—was it a terror from Hell? For he drinks—and he carols and sings like a bird! And drinking again of the magical glass, He is proud as a lion when passion-stirred! But drinking once more of the liquor, alas, He loses the shape of the angel, and takes on the shape of an ass! Lost Lands I mind me once in boyhood when the mist Swirled round me, ash of pearl and amethyst, How, in an unknown, difficult, high place, I pushed the green boughs backward from my face, And with a fire along the blood, a cry, Rode out upon a headland in the sky. I know not in what world it was—Mirak Or Algol, or some further Zodiac! I looked down on a sea of fog below; Saw strange lands rise, strange waters furl and flow, Breaking on newly lifted reefs and shores— New Africas, new Indies, new Azores— Lands that allured me to illustrious deed, Past Roland’s fame, and all his knightly breed— Fringes of lands no foot had ever found, Where billows climbed and burst without a sound; While further still, on dim untraveled seas, Gleamed lost Atlantis, lost Hesperides. Poet-Lore The poet is forever young And speaks the one immortal tongue. To him the wonder never dies, For youth is looking through his eyes. Pale listener at the heart of things, He hears the voices and the wings: He hears the skylark overhead— Hears the far footfalls of the dead. When the swift Muses seize their child, Then God has gladness rich and wild; For when the bard is caught and hurled, A splendor breaks across the world. His song distils a saving power From foot-worn stone, from wayside flower. He knows the gospel of the trees, The whispered message of the seas; Finds in some beetle on the road A power to lift the human load; Sees, in some dead leaf dried and curled, The deeper meaning of the world; Hears through the roar of mortal things The God’s immortal whisperings; Sees the world-wonder rise and fall, And knows that Beauty made it all.