Aspiration

Sitting in my lonely chamber,
     Listening to the dismal rain, 
As its melancholy plashes
     Beat against my window-pane, — 
O, what troops of sombre fancies
     Throng the chambers of the mind, 
While I hear the dirge of summer
     In the moaning of the wind! 
While I hear the dying summer
     Sobbing o'er its latest eve, 
Wailing for the hoarded glories
     That forever it must leave.

Then I say, "How brief the summer!
     Yet its early wealth of flowers, 
Ripened into golden harvests,
     Though it passes, shall be ours. 
Lo ! the apple-laden orchards!
     Lo! the sheaves of gathered grain! 
These, the largess left behind her,
     Prove she hath not lived in vain!" 
So, with fervent benedictions
     Linked, her memory shall be,
When the winter spreads his snow-pall 
     Over mountain, moor, and lea.

Passeth rapidly my summer!
     Will the promise of its flowers 
Be fulfilled in golden harvests
     When are gone its sunny hours? 
Will it ripen to a future
     Filled with memories sweet and pure, 
That shall troop like angels round me?
     Or, amid the world's obscure, 
Shall I pass, unsung, forgotten,
     With no star-crown on my brow? 
With no wail from broken harp-strings?
     With no laurel's drooping bough? 
With no dirges sobbed in anguish?
     With no grand, exultant strain 
Saying, "He who died at night-fall
     Shall to-morrow live again! 
Live in songs that cleave, like lightning,
     Through oblivion's heavy pall, 
Changing all its murk to splendor,
     Bright'ning, glorifying all; 
Live in thoughts that thrill the ages,
      (Though his body is inurned) 
Like the fire of consecration
     On Isaiah's lips that burned!"

I would wrest the meed of glory
     From the future's iron grasp, 
Or, like Egypt's Cleopatra,
     Bare my bosom to the asp!*
What to me were life, if bounded
     By the present's narrow span? 
"Worthless as the coffined ashes
     Which were once a living man! 
Let the sottish and the sensual
     Rot in their ignoble rest —

I would make the earth my debtor
     Ere I sleep upon her breast! 
I would live in after-voices
     Chanting my melodious rhyme, 
In sublime reverberations
     Sounding through remotest time; 
In the thought that prompts to greatness;
     In the deed that shrines a name 
Hallowed in the world's affection,
     Doubly consecrate to fame! 
This is life! — the flower immortal
     Springing from the earthly clod; 
Life, forever broad'ning, bright'ning,
     Till 'tis perfected in God!