| |
| ’TIS something for a poet’s lip— | |
| Our memorable comradeship. | |
| |
| The Empire City of the isle | |
| Threw down on us her awful smile. | |
| “My fate be on you,” said the Voice; | 5 |
| “Aspire, and if you can, rejoice …” | |
| |
| We entered, through a portico, | |
| By ample steps that flanged below, | |
| A dome supreme and luminous, | |
| But housing statues not for us; | 10 |
| And sullen made o’er marble tile | |
| Dumb exit through the brazen stile: | |
| The college of the liberal arts | |
| Was not the college of our hearts— | |
| We had some other ends to win … | 15 |
| |
| We saw the iron ships come in | |
| From Brooklyn Bridge, the civic towers | |
| That loomed too large for earth of ours, | |
| The pits between, the smoky pall, | |
| The stony shadows vertical | 20 |
| Aslant up many a windowed wall … | |
| |
| I’ve read that in the Middle Age, | |
| When Dante made his pilgrimage, | |
| Each Tuscan baron, bound to feud, | |
| Who housed in city walls imbued | 25 |
| With blood of Ghibelline and Guelf, | |
| Built a high watch-tower for himself, | |
| And travellers over Alps looked down | |
| On many a grim imperial town | |
| That rose in rugged silhouette | 30 |
| Of parapet by parapet | |
| Without a spire, a tree, a home— | |
| ’Twas thus with Pisa, Florence, Rome. | |
| But here it seemed some giant broods | |
| Had raised the bulwarks of their feuds | 35 |
| And mastered Titan altitudes! | |
| |
| We watched on slopes of Morningside | |
| Broad Hudson wrestling with the tide, | |
| Or from the granite balustrades | |
| The sunset o’er the Palisades, | 40 |
| Where glowed the Cosmos in the West, | |
| Like lightning flashes made to rest | |
| And lie an hour manifest … | |
| |
| We passed in moonlight down the malls | |
| Beneath the dusky citadels; | 45 |
| We wound from curve to curve in cars | |
| On lofty girders under stars; | |
| We drank in music-halls, aflame | |
| With lantern green and scarlet dame; | |
| And held, where passion most was rife, | 50 |
| |
| Our fevered talk of human life … | |
| And through the snow, the wind, the gloom, | |
| We journeyed to each other’s room, | |
| In those lamp-lit aërial crypts, | |
| Piled with our books and manuscripts— | 55 |
| So far above the flash and roar | |
| We seemed encaved forevermore | |
| Upon some cliff or mountain shore; | |
| We read in bardic ecstasies | |
| Catullus or Simonides, | 60 |
| Or chanted verses of our own | |
| In slow sonorous monotone, | |
| That sometimes clove so true and free, | |
| To us ’twas immortality; | |
| We shared the agony of tears | 65 |
| Pierced by the ignominious years, | |
| And times there were when we were three, | |
| But late it grows and where is he? | |
| |
| And I long since was inland driven | |
| To climb the hills of God as given, | 70 |
| While you again are by those seas | |
| With more of vision, power, peace. | |
| We overcame. But ’twas the press | |
| Of no ignoble restlessness— | |
| Outside the law yet not outside, | 75 |
| By austere issues justified, | |
| And justified, were all else vain, | |
| By brotherhood of song and pain. | |
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