Who gave thee words more golden than fine gold To carve in shapes more glorious than of old, And build thy songs up in the sight of time As statues set in godhead manifold: In sight and scorn of temporal change and clime That meet the sun re-risen with refluent rhyme --As god to god might answer face to face-- From lips whereon the morning strikes sublime. Dear to the god, our god who gave thee place Among the chosen of days, the royal race, The lords of light, whose eyes of old and ears Saw even on earth and heard him for a space. There are the souls of those once mortal years That wrought with fire of joy and light of tears In words divine as deeds that grew thereof Such music as he swoons with love who hears. There are the lives that lighten from above Our under lives, the spheral souls that move Through the ancient heaven of song-illumined air Whence we that hear them singing die with love. There all the crowned Hellenic heads, and there The old gods who made men godlike as they were, The lyric lips wherefrom all songs take fire, Live eyes, and light of Apollonian hair. There, round the sovereign passion of that lyre Which the stars hear and tremble with desire, The ninefold light Pierian is made one That here we see divided, and aspire, Seeing, after this or that crown to be won; But where they hear the singing of the sun, All form, all sound, all colour, and all thought Are as one body and soul in unison. There the song sung shines as a picture wrought, The painted mouths sing that on earth say nought, The carven limbs have sense of blood and growth And large-eyed life that seeks nor lacks not aught. There all the music of thy living mouth Lives, and all loves wrought of thine hand in youth And bound about the breasts and brows with gold And coloured pale or dusk from north or south. Fair living things made to thy will of old, Born of thy lips, no births of mortal mould, That in the world of song about thee wait Where thought and truth are one and manifold. Within the graven lintels of the gate That here divides our vision and our fate, The dreams we walk in and the truths of sleep, All sense and spirit have life inseparate. There what one thinks, is his to grasp and keep; There are no dreams, but very joys to reap, No foiled desires that die before delight, No fears to see across our joys and weep. There hast thou all thy will of thought and sight, All hope for harvest, and all heaven for flight; The sunrise of whose golden-mouthed glad head To paler songless ghosts was heat and light. Here where the sunset of our year is red Men think of thee as of the summer dead, Gone forth before the snows, before thy day, With unshod feet, with brows unchapleted. Couldst thou not wait till age had wound, they say, Round those wreathed brows his soft white blossoms? Nay, Why shouldst thou vex thy soul with this harsh air, Thy bright-winged soul, once free to take its way?