Poets of the Dawn -- 5 Songs for Baritone or Bass-Baritone and Piano

O ye dead Poets, who are living still
Immortal in your verse, though life be fled,
And ye, O living Poets, who are dead
Though ye are living, if neglect can kill,
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill,
With drops of anguish falling fast and red
From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,
Ye were not glad your errand to fulfil?
Yes; for the gift and ministry of Song
Have something in them so divinely sweet,
It can assuage the bitterness of wrong;
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

An old man in a lodge within a park;
  The chamber walls depicted all around
  With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound.
  And the hurt deer.  He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
  Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
  He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
  Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
  The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
  Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
  Of lark and linnet, and from every page
  Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.

A vision as of crowded city streets,
  With human life in endless overflow;
  Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow
  To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats,
Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets;
  Tolling of bells in turrets, and below
  Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw
  O'er garden-walls their intermingled sweets!
This vision comes to me when I unfold
  The volume of the Poet paramount,
  Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone;--
Into his hands they put the lyre of gold,
  And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount,
  Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.

I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold
  How the voluminous billows roll and run,
  Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun
  Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,
And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold
  All its loose-flowing garments into one,
  Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun
  Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold.
So in majestic cadence rise and fall
  The mighty undulations of thy song,
  O sightless bard, England's Maeonides!
And ever and anon, high over all
  Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,
  Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.

The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;
  The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
  The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
  To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
The nightingale is singing from the steep;
  It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
  Can it be death?  Alas, beside the fold
  A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.
Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,
  On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name
  Was writ in water."  And was this the meed
Of his sweet singing?  Rather let me write:
  "The smoking flax before it burst to flame
  Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."