The Dead Tenor
As down the stage again, With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable, Back from the fading lessons of the past, I’d call, I’d tell and own, How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee! (So firm—so liquid-soft—again that tremulous, manly timbre! The perfect singing voice—deepest of all to me the lesson—trial and test of all:) How through those strains distill’d—how the rapt ears, the soul of me, absorbing Fernando’s heart, Manrico’s passionate call, Ernani’s , sweet Gennaro’s , I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants transmuting, Freedom’s and Love’s and Faith’s unloos’d cantabile, (As perfume’s, color’s, sunlight’s correlation:) From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor, A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel’d earth, To memory of thee.
Continuities
(From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist)
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, No birth, identity, form—no object of the world, Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires, The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again; The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.