THE TWENTY-THIRD OF APRIL

by: Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909)

      LITTLE English earth and breathéd air
      Made Shakspere the divine: so is his verse
      The broidered soil of every blossom fair;
      So doth his song all sweet bird songs rehearse.
      But tell me, then, what wondrous stuff did fashion
      That part of him which took those wilding flights
      Among imagined worlds -- whence the white passion
      That burned three centuries through the days and nights?
      Not heaven’s four winds could make, nor the round earth,
      The soul wherefrom the soul of Hamlet flamed;
      Nor anything of merely mortal birth
      Could lighten as when Shakspere's name is named.
      How was his body bred we know full well,
      But that high soul’s engendering who may tell!

"The Twenty-Third of April" is reprinted from The Century, vol. 41, issue 6 (April 1891).

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