This remarkable poem appeared in the July issue of the POETRY REVIEW (published in London) and was adjudged the best of some two hundred poems submitted by writers from many countries. The contest was for the purpose of focusing the attention of the literary world on the memorial cottage for Poe at Fordham. The judges were Alfred Noyes and five leading editors. It afterward appeared in a tiny booklet in order that visitors at the Poe Cottage might have the opportunity of purchasing copies. The poem is of such importance that a wider presentation of it seems imperative. In a letter to the editor, Mr. Markham says, "You are right in feeling that I have pressed all my energies into the work of this poem. It is indeed the burst of my whole mind, a mind which has been formed by fifty years of devotion to a study of the genius and fate of Edgar Allan Poe. I have read nearly everything that has been written about him; I have come more and more to feel the tragic misfortunes of his career and the sad injustice of many of the commentaries upon it. MY ISRAFEL gave me what I was looking for an opportunity to gratify the noble pleasure of praising." I The sad great gifts the austere Muses bring— They laid upon him dreams of high romance, They sent him dreams of beauty's starrier birth, They laid upon him music's trembling charm, Whose touch can still the spirit or alarm— Build rapture, build despair. They struck him with imagination's rod, The power that built these heavens that soar and seem These heavens that are the daring of some God Stirred by the lyric dream. And then (for, oh, the Muses do not spare!) They set for him one final gift apart: They gave him sorrow as a pack to bear, Sorrow to break the heart. II And so they called the poet into Time, The saddest and the proudest of the race That ever came this way with sound of rhyme, Inquest of Beauty's face. He knew life's immemorial grief-the cry AM⠀of young Love with the ruined rainbow wings, The pathos of the vanishing, the sigh Out of all mortal things. For he was son to Proserpine, and she Steering toward Shadow with melodious helm, This side the last abyss. He knew, too, all the melancholy sounds He mused among the gray sarcophagi, He lookt on cities in their crumbling hours, III He walked our streets as on a lonely strand: Life was his exile, Earth his alien shore, And these were foreign faces that he passed; And he must home at last. His country was not here, but in the isles Of Aiden ringed around with lustrous seas, And there were gardens where the waters sing Where strange-eyed birds go by on rainbow wing, |