Classic Poem

If now is not the time more
Of love to talk, or heaven or
Whatever moot adventure
Was boast of language heretofore,

This is not that we are so dead
Or dumb, or the words so agèd
Which we have, and our need
Like desire in need disenchanted,

Or that to the talk we return
Which we spoke when concern
Was but for night's next and next morn,
And little more thought we to learn.

We are not now in such ecstasy
Because we speak more sincerely
Of those things we were drawn by
To this now naked felicity:

Because now we are done with proposing,
And because language now is disposing
Between all our affirming and disputing
To a verbal niceness of having and losing—

Because then we talked while we moved
And held hope by hope proved
And prated wisdom while we but loved
And were everyway more proud than behooved

Such mixed purpose in though fine dress
Over its unfrank nakedness
And such a maundering bliss
Wrapping such mute distress—

Because now fortune's self has grown plain
As when the traveller in the fabulous domain
Beholds for arduous ore the coin
That had been pocket-loose in his greedy brain.

Naked now are the words of anticipation,
And stilled the heaving of invention
By the hush of truth in communion
With the very priests of fiction

Who first wrote the words, and without fear
For the final sense, or that truth might hear,
And who now must make meaning with care
Lest the words with the words interfere.

For what we now talk of is all true
Or all false, since all is words, no doing to do
Or prospect to wage or more going to go
Or grief to be old or delight to be new.

We must keep faith now with what we say
And every coxcomb ghost of fancy lay,
Forbearing from the tales which cloy
The ears of time and drive the future away.

And all that we have and all that we have not
We may know by mere saying like an idiot
With a gift of swallowing in his throat
Which marks false from true soon as cold from hot.

For we are now quiet of mind thus,
As of limb and longing, that felicitous
Cannot but be the spoken use
Which of life we make, because perilous

Were it now to be less precise,
To see earth through a glass of paradise,
When only the present is left to promise
And for air the breath of our words must suffice.