Old Chants

<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN> <h2>Old Chants</h2> <p>An ancient song, reciting, ending,<br/> Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All,<br/> Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee,<br/> Accept me, thou saidst, the elder ballads,<br/> And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.<br/> <br/> (Of many debts incalculable,<br/> Haply our New World's chieftest debt is to old poems.)<br/> <br/> Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,<br/> Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,<br/> The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,<br/> The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,<br/> The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,<br/> Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,<br/> The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,<br/> The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,<br/> Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,<br/> The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays,<br/> Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,<br/> As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,<br/> The great shadowy groups gathering around,<br/> Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,<br/> Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand<br/> and word, ascending,<br/> Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent<br/> with their music,<br/> Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,<br/> Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.<br/></p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />