Classic Poem

The golden age is in my heart today:
It has cut loose from all the yesterdays and tomorrows and allied itself with today:
It has come out of the poems and pictures and prophecies and fixed itself in me:
The golden age, which you have always looked back somewhere to see:
The golden age, which you have always looked forward somewhere to see:
The always postponed defeated vision, retreating with your retreat, advancing with your advance:
The lure of the young, the mockery of the old, the folly of noontime:
The sacred perfect world everywhere nowhere crowded with populations that never lived:
The radiant flawless sundream drawing us all body and spirit into its fairy tangle:
Oh! I who looked for it outside myself in space and time and gave up my search —
Oh! I returning tired to my own flesh to my own spirit sank into its eager arms!

You heroes who lived a long while ago and you heroes who are to come a long while after me,
You joys of lovers who are dead and you joys of lovers who are unborn,
You forecasts of seers whose scriptures are a thousand years old or are to come in a thousand years,
You eras of ideals lost and you eras of ideals yet to be won,
You pastures and orchards and pipes of shepherds and social plenties that belonged to our first fathers or are to belong to our last children,
You wonders and miracles whatever you are or are to be in joy and beauty,
You builders and singers and satisfyers and discoverers who lie dead in the arts looking back or looking ahead:
No one knows better than I know what you stood for or are to stand for and your measureless worth:
And I say you are not to be made less of by me than by others who applaud and reverence you:
And I say more: I say that I will make more of you and make you more real than others ever have done:
For I say that you are not dead in books and on canvases and in scrolls of ancient parchment:
For I say that you are alive and more than alive in my heart today: all of you, whether vanished or still to appear:
For I say I choke with you — with the amplitudes and fulnesses and majesties of your treasure:
That I do not need to go anywhere to find you in the records or forecasts of other people:
That I contain you all — pasts and futures — with something invaluable added out of myself:
That thousands of golden ages could not equal in sweetness and power that one thing within my own heart —
That sweep of resistless youth that fires my buoyant blood

I would be the last to make light of my dearer fathers or my dearer sons,
But I see no reason why they should make light of me who am their son and father,
And while I take my place with what has happened and is to happen I also take my place with what is happening here now while I too am around,
For though I have gathered harvests I have also planted: I sow as well as reap:
And though I am only a simple man with no virtues or gifts to speak of I too am well enough off to go into the richest company:
And but for me no golden age would ever have been or ever could be: for me or something in me:
But for my passionate love, but for my flaming dream, but for my imperturbable cheer:
Not because I am different or superior but because I am usual and common:
If you take me for a knower you will find that I contain nothing,
If you take me for a fool I will surprise you with my wisdom,
If you take me for a saint you will stumble upon me in the midst of my sins,
If you take me for a felon you will have to acknowledge my nobility,
For the amount of it all is that I am not what you take me for but what I am:
For the amount of it all is that the golden age is not what you take it for in time but what it comes to in your heart.

The golden age comes to new life and love in my heart:
It does not come to money or fame or rulership but to men and women and children:
It does not come to anything that the world hears of but to something that never asks you to acknowledge it:
It does not come to states or churches or institutions or parties of any sort but just to you and to me:
It is invested with untold energies and cant be resisted and yet never sets itself upon a throne:
It does not have to go out of its own time or its own people to manifest itself but is immediately victorious:
The golden age, which once was farthest off, which now is closest by,
Crowding me with its provocations, lifting me upon its imminent peaks.
I have read with dimmer eyes the fading tale of a vanquished paradise:
The faithless priests lose themselves among the stars groping for a miracle:
I need no miracle: I am too much alive to postpone my exultations:
The distant impossible things have come next to me with their possible raptures:
The flower has opened before my eyes so that I can touch and fondle it and smell its perfume:
That which everybody waits for I bring and they might bring if they got as near to life as to death:
I do not cry for help into the spent years or against still unopened doors:
The best comes to pass in me right where I am: the best that has been and the best that is promised:
The golden age is in my heart today.