Classic Poem

Keep to the road, dear children, my brothers, my sisters:
It's hard to press on but it's harder to stop: steady! steady! my loved ones!
Keep to the road: do not turn back: no matter what happens, do not turn back:
There's poverty ahead and starvation ahead and battle ahead and death ahead: I refuse to see nothing:
Then there's something more ahead: there's truth ahead: Do you hear?—truth—divine unspeakable truth
I promise you no award: I hang no fruit on the trees for you:
I expect you to sustain yourselves as you go—to drink sufficient draughts of joy out of your own hearts.
This is no play pilgrimage, dear ones, my march comrades: this is done in peril of gunshot:
Here are adverse seas and nights and cold winds and bitter hates made into one vast total to baffle you:
You face the clamorous world: the world: all the world is against you contesting your passage with fierce gestures and curses:
Do not think you can come to terms with the world—there is no appeal from the straight road: keep to the road!
You have challenged the masters of the people and they are everywhere out to meet you:
The lords god of money, the lords god of trade, the lords god of the land, are out to meet you:
Do not falter: there is sorrow by the way but gladness at the end:
Do not shrink: you can afford to take blows you who are so ready to give love:
Nothing can dissuade us now, dear ones: nothing: our eyes are fixed on the signal fires beyond.
Keep to the road, my children:
Whatever your business says or your art says—whatever your kinsmen say—keep to the road!
Whatever yesterday says to you or today or power or office whatever they say, keep to the road!
I can hear your mothers pleading with you—O God! your comrade wives, they too pleading:
I can hear your fathers pleading with you—O God! your comrade husbands, they too so pleading:
And the tender ties of homes appealed to, and books, and comforts:
You must resist all, dear children: you must not yield: come: take your place by my side:
Say your good byes, cry your farewells back, but come on with me:
Soon you will be beyond all exhortation—beyond all sounds of home and the past:
Soon you will hear only your own soul strengthening soothing you, making up for what you have lost—
Your own soul, pouring into you abundant light: your own soul, recognizing and saluting you.

Keep to the road, my children—keep to the road, my dauntless darlings:
We have passed the sharpest turn of our lifemarch—our feet will soon be unshackled.
You who have resisted your friends ought to be able to resist your enemies:
The hardest fight is over, dear children, my brothers, my sisters:
The hardest fight was the love fight—the fight when those you love appealed against your love:
The hardest fight was the joy fight—the fight when the things you enjoy appealed against your joy:
You came unscarred out of that—came out with all your love and all your joy left:
The sun breaks upon you: do you not feel it tingling in your blood?—the rest of the journey will be by day.

Come children: sing hymns to the mandawn just grown red on the horizon:
Come children: chant reverent greetings to the new order just lifting its head above the edge of the earth:
Come children: summon the ever denied youngsters, the estranged boys and girls, from the courts where they sleep:
Come children: tell the world to get up: tell the world the Christ has come:
Come children: arouse the slow world—prove that we are not deceiving it with false good mornings!

Keep to the road, dear children, my brothers, my sisters!
On both sides is danger, on both sides is evil, on both sides are the good things of the earth:
The road alone is safe—on both sides are your friends and your comforts: the soul alone is safe:
Though you turn back now and the world forgives you and your family forgives you and the comforts forgive you:
What does it all amount to—if they all forgive you—if you do not forgive yourself?
Keep to the road, dear children, my brothers, my sisters!