Classic Poem

He asked to be lifted up:
The old man who had bravely carried the burden of his years:
He looked beyond to the hills and beyond the hills,
He looked beyond to space and time and beyond space and time,
Trusting his body and his soul to supporting hands.
Something unseen takes from you the dead weight of your bankruptcy,
You surrender to it the cruel and unendurable tasks,
You feel that it is sufficient to sustain you when you can no longer sustain yourself.
What is it that reaches out to me from incomputable distances and years?
Under me is the great earth to bear me up,
Under the earth are earths of farther space,
And under all earths a something still invisible more strong to uphold than all the drifting orbs
Could I anyhow fall away from this arm?
I drop down and down and down—it always catches me:
There is no abyss but it is at the bottom,
I commit no crime or sin but it works up from under and makes me pure.
Do you believe that the buildings have foundations and that you have none?
That virtue has foundations and that vice has none?
There is but one arm—it is around all—it lifts everything: do you feel it tenderly steadying you?
But take it away for an instant and all will lapse in a dead pool,
The good and bad will lapse, whatever of life will lapse, whatever of beauty or hate
Did you think that sometime the base would be taken from under your life?
That the gods would forego their privileges and stray off taking care of themselves and forgetting you?
But the arm is always there in its place
No peril is too sudden for its ceaseless vigil:
When the baby just born dies the arm is there to break its death,
When the old man asks to be lifted up the arm is there to answer him:
The same arm, sleeplessly loyal, redeeming its promise to stay:
Not stopping to ask whether you have earned its immortal suffrage.
I feel it now, this minute, serving me,
Raising me with perfect ease as high as the standards of the day,
Not lifting me to heaven for desert and dropping me into hell for desert,
But holding me only up to myself, to the level it knows I live on.
The suicide tired of life jumped right into its keep,
All enemies and friends are succored in the same embrace,
It fails nothing, not any hour I sleep, not any hour I am off guard:
It lifts me up—eternally lifts me up.