Classic Poem

Dear friend, a letter not yet written,
Never to be written, now I come to answer:
Later than never is this punctuality
Fallen between us like friendship's knife,
Bringing our minds close enough to cut.
I now know what you might have written
Had there been time to say the thing you meant:
That it could not be—a perfect friendship
Could not be. For it has not been,
Neither between you and me, nor me and them.

Agreed: an ill-matched correspondence
Entwines us each with each, and all with all.
Nor is there time to say the thing we mean:
That better matching cannot be.
There is no time—we dare not risk regret
Lest breed a general infection
And follow general death—a mutuality
Of mourning, nothing unwept for live.
This is no pedant tragedy we bear,
As if a pallid masque toward mock-interment.
From the beginning it has been
A breathing muse, and flushed with strangeness.

Thus it began, and thus, in strangeness,
Shall it at the end be not all ending,
After the courtesies and loving efforts
Have clarified the final gesture:
It could not, cannot, will not be.
Then faces mix and move cloud-like
Into sightless skyhood, unrememberable.
And sightless too of recognition
Spreads the once-familiar life-world.
There we are each astray, escorted by
Populous, ever-recent forgetfulness.

Hugely haunts the many-faced myth:
We believe we have loved, are united
In this cloudy evidence of past misunion.
We have a faith, and therefore continue
To be uncertain, to be near, far and near,
To deny that the old trysts and pledges
Were altogether a word of false hearts.

And, dear friend, what shall we complain of?
I am content that it was, is, no better, no worse,
That we are come back to original loneness
From which diverse love made blind scatter
To the four and four quarters of vision:
That we are come back, and, as before,
Dwell indissoluble and alien
In a universe of variance
Where all are one and many
By wide community of friendship failed of.