A window glow shows brilliant; and a teeming light comes in

A bare rare glare astounds the sense. Sat on his clever knowe

A spectre lector emanator tours through lore dissecting

Collecting and combining, mining out rescissions, fining,

Browsing libraries. academies, a grove a fool leaves loss

Unsavoured, but the wiser linger longer

 

Such is the measure of his treasures, well nigh since schools began

Hermetic nature under glass to raise up store profusion

Of catalyst instruction subjugating a wide world.

This is a yard-stick yet approved on; sept not seldom heard

In gracious perorations from the topmost honoured board;

Goes victualling human hands, then fashioning their freedom.

More safer in the silence than in mention in this land

 

A line can take a course a paradigm can follow

All peace and health ensue; full due of dignities;

Which seat on nature’s constant virtues, mark and amplify,

Cohesion comes along with them; and ratifies

A people proofed for staple good; drenched in Apollo’s laves

Whereas an other line might train a mean along divine

Distinction; patience separating to an Aeolian coigne

The good wheats from the chaffs. But antic, serpentine,

Disturbance making truculence in lifts a wayward barge

Is able enough cable to let out, that drift

Discovers acumen to lesser persons loose of shift

Approved by quick-fit fixes; aberration gaining ground;

Perhaps dour Ashurbanipals, fell users of irons?

 

Then more, galore intrusions, enter after, promise roses;

Alas, instead, the roll is read, of contumelies and soldiers

To travellers on this line - to sure metempsychosis

A hard decline and pregnant rigged with perilous pains

Old glories of the learning’s lights are dirtied, turned,

Desserts of cost come in

Blear, turbid, stir, like flights of mites above a humid pond

That thicken, congregate and bother; good light’s blackened, and its day

 

As grammar, logic, rhetoric, complete a head

And, first to go, recede as limber tools and feat,

When squat and abject will assents absent decorum

Strike proper process, measured manners, due proportion;

The benisons on history withdraw: advance the Persians

Thermopylae and Marathon; they never were

Hence liquid-lighted windows, blench; the evening’s here

 

A corrugated flaw explores our better mettles

Petroleum and wars; a centripetal archetype

Describes consensual dissipations fuelling - real and ripe

An angry cross empirical hangs our spiritual distress

 

O, tempes, O, mores

 

Here,

Is astonishment - regent redolent in every weathered spray

Of innocent gust, upon the prime of flowers, in full of May

Rancours and bandied insolence; is this all we can assay?