Explore "Poems: FUTURE POETRY" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No new delights to our desire / The singers of the past can yield. / I lift mine eyes to hill and field, / And see in them your yet dumb lyre, / Poets unborn and unrevealed.
Singers to come, what thoughts will start / To song? what words of yours be sent / Through man's soul, and with earth be blent? / These worlds of nature and the heart / Await you like an instrument.
Who knows what musical flocks of words / Upon these pine-tree tops will light, / And crown these towers in circling flight / And cross these seas like summer birds, / And give a voice to the day and night?
Something of you already is ours; / Some mystic part of you belongs / To us whose dreams your future throngs, / Who look on hills, and trees, and flowers, / Which will mean so much in your songs.
I wonder, like the maid who found, / And knelt to lift, the lyre supreme / Of Orpheus from the Thracian stream. / She dreams on its sealed past profound; / On a deep future sealed I dream.
She bears it in her wanderings / Within her arms, and has not pressed / Her unskilled fingers, but her breast / Upon those silent sacred strings; / I, too, clasp mystic strings at rest.
For I, i' the world of lands and seas, / The sky of wind and rain and fire, / And in man's world of long desire -- / In all that is yet dumb in these -- / Have found a more mysterious lyre.