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What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
The lords of life, the lords of life, —
I saw them pass,
In their own guise,
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
O quam te memorem virgo...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
