In silence ripen, fall, and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease! V. How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, Falling asleep in a half-dream! To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Eating the Lotos, day by day, To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, Heaped over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass! VI. Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives, And their warm tears; but all hath suffered change; Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange : Let what is broken so remain. Long labor unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars, And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. VII. But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly), Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave through the thick-twinéd vine, VIII. The Lotos blooms below the barren peak: The Lotos blows by every winding creek: All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone: Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotus-dust is blown. We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind. Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world; Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps, and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong; Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil; Till they perish and they suffer, some, 't is whispered down in hell Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, HE play is done, - the curtain drops, And looks around, to say farewell. And, when he 's laughed and said his say, One word, ere yet the evening ends, - Good-night! -I'd say the griefs, the joys, The triumphs and defeats of boys, Are but repeated in our age; I'd say your woes were not less keen, Your hopes more vain, than those of men, Your pangs or pleasures of fifteen At forty-five played o'er again. I'd say we suffer and we strive Not less nor more as men than boys, With grizzled beards at forty-five, As erst at twelve in corduroys; And if, in time of sacred youth, We learned at home to love and pray, Pray Heaven that early love and truth May never wholly pass away. And in the world, as in the school, I'd say how fate may change and shift,- The strong may yield, the good may fall, The kind cast pitilessly down. Who knows the inscrutable design? |