The Poet

No low ambition should profane his themes
Who talks with angels in his nightly dreams,
And breathes the air which gods have made divine.
And treads the courts of radiant crystalline ;
No grovelling passion, no debasing thought,
In the rich texture of his verse be wrought ;
No word to laud the villain's mean success,
Or celebrate triumphant wickedness,
Though paeans ring, and peoples, near and far,
Pay their ovations with the loud huzza;
No meed of praise to Power divorced from Good,
Trampling the law of human brotherhood ;
Nor smooth apologies in daintiest rhyme
For titled scoundrels and for gilded crime,
Since all the gold and honors of the earth
From his clear eye can hide not Honor's dearth.

Of Nature's royal priesthood, he should be 
Pure as her fountains, as her rivers free, 
Genial as light, beneficent as air, 
Loyal to Truth and Duty everywhere; 
Scorning all baseness, and in virtue strong,
Waging unceasing warfare with the wrong; 
Thus keeping still, amid the false and mean, 
The pure, white vesture of his manhood clean, 
And more than fame, and more than heaped- up gold, 
Prizing the honor he hath never sold.

When Power, grown insolent, with iron heel 
Treads down the weak, unheeding their appeal, 
Though voiced in anguish, and with suppliant cries, 
Whose mournful cadence shivers to the skies, 
Then should his voice, untremulous and clear, 
Speak the bold words that Freedom loves to hear, — 
Speak with a tone as passionless as Fate 
The prophet-curse that Time shall vindicate, 
And give the tyrant's deeds, the tyrant's name, 
To the damnation of remorseless Fame.