Classic Poem

We are now about to die the death of endeavour.
We have lain down on the old weary-bed
And composed our limbs and faces
To a picture once we saw we fancy
In a church or schoolroom (but it hangs
Unpainted on the wall of heaven,
We shall never look like that,
Heaven went as we got up that first time,
Mistrusting the young sleep of not being)
Of an angel copied out of sleep
By a shaded hand, scribbling the dawn
With night-stroke: we would now be not,
Having outlived our sleeps and wakings,
Being wakeful now with a will not to do.

We shall not do nor sleep nor be not.
We shall lie and think rapidly of death—
‘Nothing to do to-day, because we are dead’—
And have sun enough in what we have done
By which to get up and be what we have been.
We shall get up and think slowly
Of what we were and what we do not do.
We were not yet used to the world we are,
We became ourselves, but did not long look.
This is the learning of the picture in our eyes
Which hung before us like a too-near sight
Made future to the miles of memory
We loved to range, perpetuating
The strangeness of those.

We are now about to live the life we have lived.
We have got up upon the floor of time
And composed our limbs and faces
To the picture rising up with us
Out of invisible ages of endeavour
To postpone the moment of looking.

We are about to rescue ourselves from eternity
With a picture-magnet surely irresistible,
Since it is now later than eternity
Whose picture of us on the wall of heaven
From angel-blankness has enlivened
To be a mirror: which, though we deny ourselves,
In mirror's punctuality insists
The posthumous reflection.