The clinging talons and the shadowing plumes;
     Then comes the false enchantress, with her song;
     “Thou wouldst not lay thy forehead in the dust
     Like the base herd that feeds and breeds and dies! 
     Lo, the fair garlands that I weave for thee,
     Unchanging as the belt Orion wears,
     Bright as the jewels of the seven-starred Crown,
     The spangled stream of Berenice’s hair!”
     And so she twines the fetters with the flowers
     Around my yielding limbs, and the fierce bird
     Stoops to his quarry,—­then to feed his rage
     Of ravening hunger I must drain my blood
     And let the dew-drenched, poison-breeding night
     Steal all the freshness from my fading cheek,
     And leave its shadows round my caverned eyes. 
     All for a line in some unheeded scroll;
     All for a stone that tells to gaping clowns,
     “Here lies a restless wretch beneath a clod
     Where squats the jealous nightmare men call Fame!”

     I marvel not at him who scorns his kind
     And thinks not sadly of the time foretold
     When the old hulk we tread shall be a wreck,
     A slag, a cinder drifting through the sky
     Without its crew of fools!  We live too long
     And even so are not content to die,
     But load the mould that covers up our bones
     With stones that stand like beggars by the road
     And show death’s grievous wound and ask for tears;
     Write our great books to teach men who we are,
     Sing our fine songs that tell in artful phrase
     The secrets of our lives, and plead and pray
     For alms of memory with the after time,
     Those few swift seasons while the earth shall wear
     Its leafy summers, ere its core grows cold
     And the moist life of all that breathes shall die;
     Or as the new-born seer, perchance more wise,
     Would have us deem, before its growing mass,
     Pelted with stardust, atoned with meteor-balls,
     Heats like a hammered anvil, till at last Man
     and his works and all that stirred itself
     Of its own motion, in the fiery glow
     Turns to a flaming vapor, and our orb
     Shines a new sun for earths that shall be born.

     I am as old as Egypt to myself,
     Brother to them that squared the pyramids
     By the same stars I watch.  I read the page
     Where every letter is a glittering world,
     With them who looked from Shinar’s clay-built towers,
     Ere yet the wanderer of the Midland sea
     Had missed the fallen sister of the seven. 
     I dwell in spaces vague, remote, unknown,
     Save to the silent few, who, leaving earth,
     Quit all communion with their living time. 
     I lose myself in that ethereal void,
     Till I have tired my wings and long to fill
     My breast with denser air, to stand, to walk