Classic Poem

There is battle here, there is clean and vigorous war,
There are bivouacs visited by night's every star,
There are long, barren slopes of enchantment burned clean by the sun
And ramparts of strange, new dreams to be stormed and won.
Here the five-petaled wild rose blossoms more sweet
Because the earth is barren and the heat
Intolerable for lush, domestic grass;
The ocean shines like many discs of brass,
Or between white hollows it lapses, great and green,
Where solitude sifts slowly in between
The hills of sparkling waste that rise and fall—
Hills whose one music is the sea bird's call.…
And here is all space that ever eye can see:
The ocean completing all immensity,
And the sky, mother of infinity;
Yet greatness on smallness jostles till both are one
And a grain of sand stands doorkeeper to the sun!