Explore "Wapentake" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To Alfred Tennyson
Poet! I come to touch thy lance with mine; / Not as a knight, who on the listed field / Of tourney touched his adversary's shield / In token of defiance, but in sign / Of homage to the mastery, which is thine, / In English song; nor will I keep concealed, / And voiceless as a rivulet frost-congealed, / My admiration for thy verse divine. / Not of the howling dervishes of song, / Who craze the brain with their delirious dance, / Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart! / Therefore to thee the laurel-leaves belong, / To thee our love and our allegiance, / For thy allegiance to the poet's art.