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I ON the last day of the old year retreating, | |
| I walked upon a long flat road, apart. | |
| Between the gaunt trees far away the sunset | |
| Sent its last shaft of crimson to my heart. | |
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| To eastward, between branches blue and lifeless, | 5 |
| Were clouds encircling a pale ashen stain, | |
| Wherein the moon peered like a sick old woman | |
| At a blurred window-pane. | |
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| The roadway, filled with drear grey puddles, | |
| Went stretching on, a smudge of dirty brown; | 10 |
| Dimmer and duller every instant | |
| As the last daylight faded down. | |
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| Faint lights gleamed from the sombre frowning house-fronts, | |
| But no one passed. The roadway was quite bare. | |
| It seemed to me that all the lives about me | 15 |
| Were flickering out before some great despair. | |
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| Horribly down the chill road the wind whistled | |
| As a dying man might breathe between clenched teeth. | |
| I did not care, I knew the New Year coming | |
| Would be less happy than the year beneath. | 20 |
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II Long ago my life had been a great sea raging | |
| With furious love and hate, | |
| A lonely sea without a crag to break on, | |
| Or coast to bear its weight. | |
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| Long ago I madly longed for a settled purpose, | 25 |
| For bounds to give my thought; | |
| And lo! the purpose and the bounds were given, | |
| But not the ones I sought. | |
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| Long ago I had dreamed of distant unseen islands, | |
| Tipped with white peaks, covered with whispering pines; | 30 |
| But now I only found some straight dull mud-banks | |
| Empty of human signs. | |
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| Long ago I had lived as I would—the world lay open, | |
| There was no force to dread. | |
| But now I was pushed along by a steady current | 35 |
| Toward the gulf of the dead. | |
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| Till at last, at the turn of the year, the banks closed inwards, | |
| And I found I could only go | |
| Whither the meaningless will of the years would take me, | |
| Far from the freedom of that long ago. | 40 |
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III Destiny’s shadow settles on my forehead, | |
| It falls on me as on all men alike: | |
| I suddenly know that youth is taken from me, | |
| Its hour will never strike. | |
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| I suddenly know the old wild will that hurried me | 45 |
| Onwards through joy and sorrow, now is gone. | |
| Under a sterner lash I drudge forever | |
| Toward my goal, alone. | |
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| Let other hearts enkindle every morning | |
| At the sun’s uplifted hands. | 50 |
| I must go on, alone, in treacherous twilight | |
| Toward the dismal lands: | |
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| Toward the kingdoms no man seeks to enter, | |
| While over me, each day, | |
| Like a grey bird of the marshes, wheels and rises | 55 |
| And glides away— | |
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| Glides away leaving the old ache in me burning | |
| More keen, more unsubdued; | |
| While deeper and deeper still there spreads about me | |
| My final solitude. | 60 |
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IV Water floats lazily through all the regions of heaven; | |
| It writhes and flutters and rolls before the wind. | |
| It bursts from the earth in springs, it spreads in lakes and marshes; | |
| It is unconfined. | |
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| Strike it, it does not break; cut it, it does not alter; | 65 |
| Throw torches upon it, it yet consumes the flame. | |
| Pen it with mighty rocks, it rises ever higher; | |
| To it mere sand or granite are the same. | |
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| It trickles from the snows upon earth’s topmost summits, | |
| It pours in torrents through deep-wooded lands; | 70 |
| It spreads out, makes great lakes in lower valleys; | |
| In deserts it flows yet beneath the sands. | |
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| My soul in me is only moving water, | |
| Poured out upon the black and sterile earth | |
| By thunder-clouds that burst and loosed their burden, | 75 |
| Gathered for endless years before my birth. | |
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| My soul in me has grown a monstrous river | |
| That moves straight onwards towards an unseen sea; | |
| Rushing and straight and turbid, never stopping, | |
| From long banks never free; | 80 |
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| Perhaps I shall come to the desert, find about me | |
| Sand everywhere; no end. | |
| Perhaps I shall sink in the dust, and all my being | |
| With formless earth shall blend. | |
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| Perhaps, with my current checked in its slow falling, | 85 |
| I shall spread out, a broad lake for the sun; | |
| Perhaps I shall wind about uneasy marshes | |
| For years, my task undone. | |
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| But neither desert nor lake nor marsh shall stop me | |
| From what I once began; | 90 |
| Free as the sea, exultant in my freedom, | |
| The life-work of a man. | |
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| And I shall work free at last, and aloft as a leaping dragon, | |
| To the sky I shall take my flight, | |
| Flowing and reverberating through the empty halls of heaven | 95 |
| Day after infinite day and night on endless night. | |
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