Explore "Poems: THE MODERN POET: A SONG OF DERIVATIONS" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I come from nothing; but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear? / Down, through long links of death and birth, / From the past poets of the earth. / My immortality is there.
I am like the blossom of an hour. / But long, long vanished sun and shower / Awoke my breath i' the young world's air. / I track the past back everywhere / Through seed and flower and seed and flower.
Or I am like a stream that flows / Full of the cold springs that arose / In morning lands, in distant hills; / And down the plain my channel fills / With melting of forgotten snows.
Voices, I have not heard, possessed / My own fresh songs; my thoughts are blessed / With relics of the far unknown. / And mixed with memories not my own / The sweet streams throng into my breast.
Before this life began to be, / The happy songs that wake in me / Woke long ago and far apart. / Heavily on this little heart / Presses this immortality.