Come, Poet, Come!

Come, Poet, come!     A thousand labourers ply their task,     And what it tends to scarcely ask,     And trembling thinkers on the brink     Shiver, and know not how to think.     To tell the purport of their pain,     And what our silly joys contain;     In lasting lineaments pourtray     The substance of the shadowy day;     Our real and inner deeds rehearse,     And make our meaning clear in verse:     Come, Poet, come! for but in vain     We do the work or feel the pain,     And gather up the seeming gain,     Unless before the end thou come     To take, ere they are lost, their sum.     Come, Poet, come!     To give an utterance to the dumb,     And make vain babblers silent, come;     A thousand dupes point here and there,     Bewildered by the show and glare;     And wise men half have learned to doubt     Whether we are not best without.     Come, Poet; both but wait to see     Their error proved to them in thee.     Come, Poet, come!     In vain I seem to call. And yet     Think not the living times forget.     Ages of heroes fought and fell     That Homer in the end might tell;     Oer grovelling generations past     Upstood the Doric fane at last;     And countless hearts on countless years     Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,     Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;     Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome     The pure perfection of her dome.     Others, I doubt not, if not we,     The issue of our toils shall see;     Young children gather as their own     The harvest that the dead had sown,     The dead forgotten and unknown.