Classic Poem

How beautiful on yonder casement pane
 The mild Moon gazes! Mark
With what a lonely and majestic step
 She treads the heavenly hills;
And oh! how soft, how silently, she pours
Her chasten'd radiance on the scene below,
 And hill, and dale, and tow'r,
 Drink the pure flood of light.

II.

Roll on, roll thus, Queen of the midnight hour,
 For ever beautiful!
And ill befal the Demon of the Storm,
 When he would seize on thee;
When he would lay a hand unhallowed here,
Breathe pestilential darkness in thy face,
 And rend those lucid robes,
 And tear that silvery hair.

III.

Thou shinest on a world of wretchedness,
 On one vast sepulchre,
Where man is dancing on his father's grave,
 And of the creeping worms,
That crawl innumerous from his father's mould,
The fool is forming rings to deck himself,
 And round his fingers twines
 The coiling slimy brood.

IV.

Yes, man is wasting life and hope away,
 To add a wing to time;
(Whom nature gave but one, of small avail,)
 And when the work's complete,
When his well-fledged companion soars away,
O then man gazes wild and vacantly,
 With idiot stare around,
 And wonders how he flew!

V.

Although thou lookest on such misery,
 All has not dimm'd thy ray,
Or torn one silver ringlet from thy brow;
 And yet thy peaceful light
Beaming such beauty on a world of woe,
Is like the bloom upon Consumption's cheek,
 All loveliness without,
 While ruin gnaws within.

VI.

What art thou? from thy orbit come those hordes
 Of wild fantastic forms,
(Their crowns of pearly evening dew, their robes
 Wrought by the gossamer,)
Who sport beneath thy beam? or is it there
That angels strike their silver harps, and call
 The listening spheres around,
 To join the mazy dance?

VII.

Perhaps thou art the future residence
 Of genius, wretched here:
Perhaps the poet and the minstrel who
 Have suffer'd, sunk, and died,
Releas'd from mortal shackles flee to thee,
And warbling soft seraphic melodies
 Their gentle spirits rove
 At peace in thy mild sphere.

VIII.

If so, O for some lunar paradise
 Where I may think no more
Of earth and earthliness, unless, perchance
 When evening glooms below,
Sometimes to wander downward on thy beam
To flit across the scenes I once admir'd,
 And hover, and protect
 The heads of those I lov'd!