Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 18061861687. A Musical Instrument
WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan, | |
Down in the reeds by the river? | |
Spreading ruin and scattering ban, | |
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, | |
And breaking the golden lilies afloat | 5 |
With the dragon-fly on the river. | |
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, | |
From the deep cool bed of the river; | |
The limpid water turbidly ran, | |
And the broken lilies a-dying lay, | 10 |
And the dragon-fly had fled away, | |
Ere he brought it out of the river. | |
High on the shore sat the great god Pan, | |
While turbidly flow’d the river; | |
And hack’d and hew’d as a great god can | 15 |
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, | |
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed | |
To prove it fresh from the river. | |
He cut it short, did the great god Pan | |
(How tall it stood in the river!), | 20 |
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, | |
Steadily from the outside ring, | |
And notch’d the poor dry empty thing | |
In holes, as he sat by the river. | |
‘This is the way,’ laugh’d the great god Pan | 25 |
(Laugh’d while he sat by the river), | |
‘The only way, since gods began | |
To make sweet music, they could succeed.’ | |
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, | |
He blew in power by the river. | 30 |
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! | |
Piercing sweet by the river! | |
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! | |
The sun on the hill forgot to die, | |
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly | 35 |
Came back to dream on the river. | |
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, | |
To laugh as he sits by the river, | |
Making a poet out of a man: | |
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain— | 40 |
For the reed which grows nevermore again | |
As a reed with the reeds of the river. |