Classic Poem

What gained you for your pains? A fevered eye?
A haunted sense of loathing in the soul?
This rocking mountain of flesh lift heavens' high,
And you with itching fingers tumbling the whole
Upon yourself—is that the sum of bliss?
This incidental womanhood—this leap
Out of yourself into an unknown void,
To return blind and howling to the keep
Of draw-bridged, sterile manhood—it has destroyed
Your power to give or even to take a kiss.
Ah, but your rank, rude, hungry, ignorant lust,
Though wild and boorish, wears an honest face;
This bonfire soon burns out: this whirring gust
Of boisterous wind sheer calm will soon outpace,
And haply, at your own self-lighted fire,
You, in the afterglow, love's form discerned:
Haply the riotous whirlwind of desire
Brought on its wings treasure you little earned;
So is it with the truth confessed and known.
But God! to suffer three-score years of life
With hungriness like yours upon our heels,
And never once take our desire to wife,
But turn about from her on custom's wheels—
To prank and glance over a furtive shoulder—
Disguise with vapid smiles and veils of wit
The aching fires that inly smoke and smoulder—
In self-consumed unhappiness to sit
Till we are effigies of manhood cursing
The God-like power whereby our lives subsist—
This, barbarous-mannered friend, is a much worse thing
Than your approach to love with clenchèd fist;
And this (but let me whisper in your ear),
This is the mode in my much later year.