Classic Poem

And this is what Love said to me in the watch of our night:

Go into the broadcast world,
Try your love on haters, on the alien, thieves, those who take life,
Try your love in wars, in the drift and dreg of the underflow,
Let your love take lessons of those who do not love yet endure—of those who without returns yet live.
Why should you palter here with your untried love—here at hospitable gates?
Why should your love keep its feet tender and its palms soft?
Go with your love where it is not wanted:
Go with love to locked doors, where it finds backs turned or eyes casting suspicious looks:
Take it where it must be maimed: offer it as a last tribute to murder:
Drag it through gutters and slime, trail it through vice, track it across bloodshed:
Fling it to vipers, freeze it in arctic ice, burn it in tropic fire.
What is this love you fix and fit in a parlor and set forth on carpets?
You swear it is love: you bring it along with all the accepted credentials:
But I do not recognize the counterfeit, my heart rejects the sham
Love of attitudes and dress, love of arbors and great fortunes,
Love of flowers and gentility, love of perfumes and joyances,
Love of feeders and clothers, love of flatterers and suborners,
Love that masks and mocks, love that stutters and steals.
Take your love away and suffer with it—
Take it to calvaries, fast with it in wildernesses,
Travel till its feet bleed, till its sight is gone, till it drops by the wayside.
You dally with me, demanding to exchange love for love:
I declare that you must exchange love for hate:
You come to me as to one preferred to all the rest:
I shall expect you to prefer all the rest, then come to me.
You brought me armfuls of roses: their sweet accents were daggers—their fair colors were poisons:
But your careful fingers were not once pricked by a thorn:
Your gloved precautions allowed you to worship without harm,
But I am cruel—I demand pain and hurt: I only desire you after you are despoiled and defeated
Go now: we have had sweet days together: but sweet days are not love.
Go now: we have tested our love by all the golden rules of precedent and prestige.
Now you must abandon the road, must desert all known paths and trust yourself to the outlying spaces.
After many days you may—you may, O heart—come back to me again with love:
After days, survivals, you may come back to me:
Then you will put your love at my threshold and go away:
You will go away: and you will not come again till I call: and you will go cheerfully about your life and listen:
And my heart will not forget.

And that is what Love said to me in the watch of our night.