Pierced By The Song

In the company of the merriest elves,
I have danced with dreams.
In the company of naiads themselves, 
I have swum the streams

That flowed through ancient Greece and Rome,
And brightened ancient days,
And made the magic places home
To satyrs' loving ways,

Satyrs that gamboled in the forest
With nymphs of the oak trees,
While stars sang through the leaves a chorus
Of Hyperborean seas.

In the company of heroes fair,
I have heard the sirens sing,
That only Odysseus dared to dare.
And dragons on the wing

Have taken flight over me, as I stood,
And heard Shakespeare's lovers laugh
In the green depths of Arden Wood.
And I have found the path

To the North Wind and back again,
Through all of old Midgard.
I have touched the serpent unseen by men,
And played with Bacchus's pard.

In the company of mermaids sweet, 
I have leaped into the sea,
Which Coleridge's albatross has beat
Into a carpet bright to see,

Where the sea serpents race and coil,
And the Argonaut goes by,
Where Athena's olive trees loose their oil
Beneath an Elysian sky,

And somewhere in the sea that gleams,
There Circe's isle lies,
Haven of transmutation's dreams
Where soul to form is wise.

In the company of phoenixes,
I have watched the sun go down,
Where light of east and of west mixes
On gray Stonehenge's crown,

While Ra beneath the world bears the sun
Where Osiris lives and dies,
And Isis's streams and the Nile run
Far from Hathor's skies,

Where Thoth the ibis-headed wings,
And Anubis guards the gates,
Pierced by the song that Memnon sings
At dawn of loves and hates.

In the company of old Greece and Rome
I have seen the birth-
Cytharea's birth from silvery foam!
And all the grace of earth

Was embodied there, as in fairy rings
That overnight spring up,
As sudden as the Ganymede-eagle's wings
That bore him to bear the cup,

And as wild as the wild-hornéd moons
That over Arcady sail,
Borne aloft by wave after wave of shining tunes
From Keats's nightingale.