Songs of Experience

Youth, large, lusty, loving --
  Youth full of grace, force, fascination!
Do you know that Old Age may come after you,
  with equal grace, force, fascination?

Day, full-blown and splendid -- 
  Day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter.
The Night follows close, with millions of suns, 
  and sleep, and restoring darkness.

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When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange -- my youth.

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Little feet too young and soft to walk,
Little lips too young and pure to talk,
Little faded grass-tufts, root and stalk.

I lie alone here, utterly alone,
Amid pure ashes my wild ashes mingle;
A drowned man, with a name unknown,
A drifting waif, flung by the drifting shingle.
Oh, plotting brain and restless heart of mine,
What strange fate brought you to so strange a shrine?

Sometimes a woman comes across the grass,
Bare-footed, with pit-patterings scarcely heard,
Sometimes the grazing cattle slowly pass,
Or on my turf sings loud some mating bird.
Oh, plotting brain and restless heart of mine,
What strange fate brought you to so strange a shrine?

Little feet too young and soft to walk,
Little lips too young and pure to talk,
Little faded grass-tufts, root and stalk.

Two butterflies went out at noon
And waltzed [above a stream]1,
Then stepped straight through the firmament
And rested on a beam;

And then together bore away
Upon a shining sea, -
Though never yet, in any port,
Their coming mentioned be.

If spoken by the distant bird,
If met in ether sea
By frigate or by merchantman,
[Report was not]2 to me.