Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Poems Subjective and Reminiscent

Raphael

Suggested by the portrait of Raphael, at the age of fifteen.

I SHALL not soon forget that sight:

The glow of Autumn’s westering day,

A hazy warmth, a dreamy light,

On Raphael’s picture lay.

It was a simple print I saw,

The fair face of a musing boy;

Yet, while I gazed, a sense of awe

Seemed blending with my joy.

A simple print,—the graceful flow

Of boyhood’s soft and wavy hair,

And fresh young lip and cheek, and brow

Unmarked and clear, were there.

Yet through its sweet and calm repose

I saw the inward spirit shine;

It was as if before me rose

The white veil of a shrine.

As if, as Gothland’s sage has told,

The hidden life, the man within,

Dissevered from its frame and mould,

By mortal eye were seen.

Was it the lifting of that eye,

The waving of that pictured hand?

Loose as a cloud-wreath on the sky,

I saw the walls expand.

The narrow room had vanished,—space,

Broad, luminous, remained alone,

Through which all hues and shapes of grace

And beauty looked or shone.

Around the mighty master came

The marvels which his pencil wrought,

Those miracles of power whose fame

Is wide as human thought.

There drooped thy more than mortal face,

O Mother, beautiful and mild!

Enfolding in one dear embrace

Thy Saviour and thy Child!

The rapt brow of the Desert John;

The awful glory of that day

When all the Father’s brightness shone

Through manhood’s veil of clay.

And, midst gray prophet forms, and wild

Dark visions of the days of old,

How sweetly woman’s beauty smiled

Through locks of brown and gold!

There Fornarina’s fair young face

Once more upon her lover shone,

Whose model of an angel’s grace

He borrowed from her own.

Slow passed that vision from my view,

But not the lesson which it taught;

The soft, calm shadows which it threw

Still rested on my thought:

The truth, that painter, bard, and sage,

Even in Earth’s cold and changeful clime,

Plant for their deathless heritage

The fruits and flowers of time.

We shape ourselves the joy or fear

Of which the coming life is made,

And fill our Future’s atmosphere

With sunshine or with shade.

The tissue of the Life to be

We weave with colors all our own,

And in the field of Destiny

We reap as we have sown.

Still shall the soul around it call

The shadows which it gathered here,

And, painted on the eternal wall,

The Past shall reappear.

Think ye the notes of holy song

On Milton’s tuneful ear have died?

Think ye that Raphael’s angel throng

Has vanished from his side?

Oh no!—We live our life again;

Or warmly touched, or coldly dim,

The pictures of the Past remain,—

Man’s works shall follow him!

1842.