Classic Poem

What good, I ask myself, what fortunate thing
Amid so many evils that we taste
Do these strange years of middle-passage bring
Where thief and rust and moth have so made waste?
And as I count them over one by one—
Patience and prudence and more generous thought—
I see none here to match the great gifts gone
Nor any fit atonement time has brought.
—Save perhaps one: the calm and certain will
Whose baffled purpose still relentless goes
Across the world, unconquerable still,
Seeking the unknown goal that well it knows—
Like a bleak eagle that with blinded eye
Drives on its way across the wind-swept sky.