Alice Meynell

Singers to Come

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.