Music

Thou, oh, thou!     Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum! thou     Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow!     Music, who by the plangent waves,     Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves,     Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars,     Touchest reverberant bars     Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;--     Keeping regret and memory awake,     And all the immortal ache     Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days     In retrospection!--now, oh, now,     Interpreter and heart-physician, thou,     Who gazest on the heaven and the hell     Of life, and singest each as well,     Touch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips,     Or thy melodious lips,     This sickness named my soul,     Making it whole,     As is an echo of a chord,     Or some symphonic word,     Or sweet vibrating sigh,     That deep, resurgent still doth rise and die     On thy voluminous roll;     Part of the beauty and the mystery     That axles Earth with song; and as a slave,     Swings it around and 'round on each sonorous pole,     'Mid spheric harmony,     And choral majesty,     And diapasoning of wind and wave;     And speeds it on its far elliptic way     'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day.--     O cosmic cry     Of two eternities, wherein we see     The phantasms, Death and Life,     At endless strife     Above the silence of a monster grave.