Joy like a stream flows through the Christmas-streets / Alexander Smith

from Sonnets

Joy like a stream flows through the Christmas-streets,
But I am sitting in my silent room,
Sitting all silent in congenial gloom.
To-night, while half the world the other greets
With smiles and grasping hands and drinks and meats,
I sit and muse on my poetic doom;
Like the dim scent within a budded rose,
A joy is folded in my heart; and when
I think on Poets nurtured 'mong the throes,
And by the lowly hearths of common men, —
Think of their works, some song, some swelling ode
With gorgeous music growing to a close,
Deep-muffled as the dead -march of a god, —
My heart is burning to be one of those.

~~
Alexander Smith (1830-1867)
from Poems, 1853

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Alexander Smith biography

Jacobus Josephus Eeckhout  (1793–1861), Writing Man, 1859. 

Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.