Classic Poem

They never know who only know alone.
Who deeply knows must also deeply feel.
Life is a knife ground on a grinder's wheel,
A sea-worn crag, a river-polished stone.
Knowledge for suffering doth to love atone.
O who would not to grim experience kneel,
And feel the fiat of fate's averted heel,
To know in truth the great world's under-moan.

There in her dungeons where her weird mimes flit,
Behind the curtains of her phantom show,
With grim reality for aye to sit,
And watch those puppet-maskers come and go,
Who build the shadow-dreams that rise and fall,
Grotesque, distorted, on life's sombre wall.