Classic Poem

The clock within us, speaking time
By heart-beat seconds and by mental years,
Is garrulous in any gear,
So life at once seems short and endless.
Who is not glad to find the hour later than he thought?
For so he has killed, not time
But the inward timing of the ceaseless rote.
Its beat, which makes him count the cost
Of that creation which, loving, he cannot resist,
Hurries him on to end whatever was begun —
The child, to be grown, the poem, to be done.

But in each other's arms,
Or on the tide of prayer, when we
Encountering souls support each other, like swimmers in a blissful sea,
The cost is known as the cause of bliss,
And the gabbling rote is heard as a murmur of peace.
So making love we say, but love makes us
Again to be as in our listening-time,
When hearing our heart-beat we took it for the world's,
And with no wish to escape it, then and there
Loved what we were.