Classic Poem

The herd of glaciers from these brooks has run;
Huge boulders mark the sway
Of their moraines, rude confines of a day.
Through the same gates, fore-goers of the Hun,
Goth, Carthaginian, pressed and passed away.
We now, the riper peoples, rightly sure
We must withstand the harsh and immature,
The bitter-hearted, toss'd from dream to dream,
Fiercely unstable — in all things extreme —
These overlordship-seekers; we intent
That the spirit of every folk shall take its bent
Sunward, and wayward in experiment
Adventure, — each small nation stand uncurbed —
We shall put down the agressors, unperturbed. . . .
What is life's enemy? Not they
But the sense of human life's futility.
The vainness of ourselves, as of our foes —
To that swift passage what can Man oppose
Who, brawler between two lights, God and Death —
Sun-marshall'd and moon-tended — journeyeth?
What natures clear, enduring, can
Enter the hot and childish discord, Man?
Flowing or floating — what of worth can be
Establish'd?
Courage, Awareness, the pois'd Soul.
The rooted forest-people's polity
Profound; of forest verdure that stands true
And rooted in its own slopes' golden bowl
Spreads free. Here, every happy mead
Hath windflowers of a different hue;
And sun-born Love, the mountain flower, is bred,
And, family by starry family,
Spreads chalices, whereof each petal young
Is a new life: fresh Awareness — tenderly swung
And diffused, as moveth a breeze over grasses and trees —
Of more: all other men's lives, all other men's ease. . . .
Guard we this new Soul against tyrannies!
The soul is end enough, if nought else is
To come to flower against the precipice.
Yonder in Brescia bronze-wing'd Victory
Doth still in her subalpine temple stand,
Holding a vanish'd shield beneath her hand:
Her sons will not to the north's menace yield.
Rather than live unworthy of their land
Some will forgo existences and fames, —
Theirs will be written with the unknown names
Inscribed for ever on the vanish'd shield;
The viewless shield itself, their souls shall be!