Classic Poem

When all our troubled errantries are done,
And faiths and lures alike have lost their sway,
And but the subtle body, rotting alone,
Is left to prove the daring of our day;
And if we won, head-high, or if we lost
Is now no matter anywhere; and unswerved
The seasons roll, indifferent to the cost
Of pageantries we ruled or faiths we served —
Then of the passion whose attainment was
So serious business while we lived and sought,
Perhaps some faint and ghostly flush shall pass
Out of a vase or song or tower we wrought,
And rest one moment upon men as blind
As we were, bent on hopes we leave behind.
I trust the young — who, dreaming, shall awake
On sudden Springs and capture, fluttering by,
These gleams of memory — capture them, and make
Old lights to flicker on new wings that fly.
Then such a dreamer shall, in one, bear fruit
Of all that from our million Junes could live, —
From pulses quenched, lips even whose dust is mute,
Hopes whose so mighty part was fugitive.
He shall inherit us; and not yet come
Into the full enthrallment of his day,
Shall feel, within his bosom, stir the bloom
Of all our Springs, a thousand years away —
The moment's mirror of our final light
In infinite dust vanishing down the night.

So out of horrors that could break the heart,
Did the heart keep its bitterer memories,
There desperately survives some rarer part —
Old, meager consolations such as these.
And when the baffled spirit dares to brood
Alone with its own destiny face to face
It finds, in that grim midnight solitude,
Some ancient smouldering altar of the race.
With hard-won fuel we feed the little fire,
Shielding its hesitant flame against the blast —
We, heritors of an unfulfilled desire
That it burn brighter than in the somber past.
At midnight, by the ghostly flame, alone,
We pray, — beside that altar's blood-drenched stone.