Classic Poem

Let not their doubts prevail at last against me,
I who have set to build a hall of state;
They cannot know, with getting and with spending,
The things to come for which I work and wait.
I hasten slowly with divinest leisure,
Lie in the sun a long day at a time;
With unconcern I watch the wave dissolving
The frail sand-castles of my lonely rhyme.
There are great ships that shoulder down the channel,
There are white gulls that float and dip and sail;
And I with sand that slips between my fingers
Smile as they follow the broad-flung, far sea-trail.

What can they find who scale the gates of ocean
Beyond the sea in those enchanted lands,
So warm and strange, dappled, brown, and lovely
As this elusive swiftness in my hands?

I will arise when I am drunk of sunlight,
Fostered of wind and intimate with earth,
Back to the lengthening shadows of the mountains,
The inviolate snow-fields of the river's birth.
There in the mists that veil the shimmering aspen,
There on the granite pinnacles of time
I shall uprear of stones that make my pillow
The homely hospice of all souls that climb.
To sound of music made of many voices
Uprose the snowy walls of Camelot
By Merlin's magic … my hearth-fires shall kindle
From flaming hearts that burned and knew it not.
Let not the fears of all the valley-dwellers
Fetter my feet fain of the flint and fern;
I will have done with measuring and weighing,
Shielding no more the candle—let it burn!
It little matters if the wick be wasting,
Sooner or late the thing to do is done;
Let not their doubts prevail at last against me,
Stretched on the sand and brothering the sun.