Classic Poem

I

Only an empty platitude for God,
Only for poetry a jangling nerve,
Only for life the baser lusts to serve,
Only a fashion where the function stood.
Only a shadow stealing span on span
Over the unmeasured whiteness of the soul;
Darkness around the God-established goal
That blazed before the innocence of man.
And when the flame of adolescence breaks
On some wild heart the world has overthrown,
He stares as one who waits alone and wakes,
Cheated of love and faith, his vision drawn
Haggard and hopeless from his death-bed down
The hard, gray, tacit distances of dawn.