Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A PRAYER FOR LIFE, by GEORGE SHEPARD BURLEIGH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A PRAYER FOR LIFE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: O father, let me not die young!
Last Line: I cannot now die young!
Subject(s): Mortality; Prayer; Youth


O FATHER, let me not die young!
Earth's beauty asks a heart and tongue
To give true love and praises to her worth;
Her sins and judgment-sufferings call
For fearless martyrs to redeem thy Earth
From her disastrous fall.
For though her summer hills and vales might seem
The fair creation of a poet's dream,—
Ay, of the Highest Poet,
Whose wordless rhythms are chanted by the gyres
Of constellate star-choirs,
That with deep melody flow and overflow it,—
The sweet Earth,—very sweet, despite
The rank grave-smell forever drifting in
Among the odors from her censers white
Of wave-swung lilies and of wind-swung roses,—
The Earth sad-sweet is deeply attaint with sin!
The pure air, which encloses
Her and her starry kin,
Still shudders with the unspent palpitating
Of a great Curse, that to its utmost shore
Thrills with a deadly shiver
Which has not ceased to quiver
Down all the ages, nathless the strong beating
Of Angel-wings, and the defiant roar
Of Earth's Titanic thunders.

Fair and sad,
In sin and beauty, our belovèd Earth
Has need of all her sons to make her glad;
Has need of martyrs to refire the hearth
Of her quenched altars,—of heroic men
With freedom's sword, or Truth's supernal pen,
To shape the worn-out mold of nobleness again.
And she has need of Poets who can string
Their harps with steel to catch the lightning's fire,
And pour her thunders from the clanging wire,
To cheer the hero, mingling with his cheer,
Arouse the laggard in the battle's rear,
Daunt the stern wicked, and from discord wring
Prevailing harmony, while the humblest soul
Who keeps the tune the warder angels sing
In golden choirs above,
And only wears, for crown and aureole,
The glow-worm light of lowliest human love,
Shall fill with low, sweet undertones the chasms
Of silence, 'twixt the booming thunder-spasms.
And Earth has need of Prophets fiery-lipped
And deep-souled, to announce the glorious dooms
Writ on the silent heavens in starry script,
And flashing fitfully from her shuddering tombs,—
Commissioned Angels of the new-born Faith,
To teach the immortality of Good,
The soul's God-likeness, Sin's coeval death,
And Man's indissoluble Brotherhood.

Yet never an age, when God has need of him,
Shall want its Man, predestined by that need,
To pour his life in fiery word or deed,—
The strong Archangel of the Elohim!
Earth's hollow want is prophet of his coming:
In the low murmur of her famished cry,
And heavy sobs breathed up despairingly,
Ye hear the near invisible humming
Of his wide wings that fan the lurid sky
Into cool ripples of new life and hope,
While far in its dissolving ether ope
Deeps beyond deeps, of sapphire calm, to cheer
With Sabbath gleams the troubled Now and Here.

Father! thy will be done!
Holy and righteous One!
Though the reluctant years
May never crown my throbbing brows with white,
Nor round my shoulders turn the golden light
Of my thick locks to wisdom's royal ermine:
Yet by the solitary tears,
Deeper than joy or sorrow,—by the thrill,
Higher than hope or terror, whose quick germin,
In those hot tears to sudden vigor sprung,
Sheds, even now, the fruits of graver age,—
By the long wrestle in which inward ill
Fell like a trampled viper to the ground,—
By all that lifts me o'er my outward peers
To that supernal stage
Where soul dissolves the bonds by Nature bound,—
Fall when I may, by pale disease unstrung,
Or by the hand of fratricidal rage,
I cannot now die young!





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