Classic Poem

Who can measure the agony of man?
There seem too many of us:
Too many millions: too great a multitude of needy beings:
Too myriad-hearted a need …
What sun, what rain shall feed this human grass of the Earth?

Alas! in the crowd I come and go, confused and wandering:
I cannot see a meaning in the tumult and disaster:
I cannot guess a triumphant purpose in this pinch of man-dust on this hidden planet …
As the street-crowds run from my bereavèd spirit,
So crowds of the stars rush past, heedless of our trouble …
Yet it goes on:
Yet we have clothes on our back and food for our mouth,
And a thousand creeds pronounce their rival revelations,
And stout-hearted we go forth to fight in the morning
And lay us down at night, spent, spent …

All day they carry out the dead from the city, and all day the cry of the new-born echoes behind the walls …
Youth is broken on the streets and the lovers part and the married hate and long for an ending:
Child against mother, son against father, the strong at the throats of the weak:
And every generation the annihilator of the generation that brought it to birth …

Havoc and disaster,
And a going down to graves and a last dissolution:
And the bleak winds of November blowing up from the seas,
And the Earth dismantled and dying, dying …

I that found thee in my soul and in the radiance of the sun,
Hide now alone, bereft: cut off:
A few pounds of human trouble:
A little wisp of darkness:
A fleck of shadow on immensity.