Classic Poem

Much too much of this I have heard:
The World is growing forever old,
Its flowers perish in the mould,
And all things pass as a tale that is told:
Life is a glimmer, fading fast
Into the charnel of the Past,
And Death is ever the final word.
O much too much of this I have heard!
Of course we know that all things flow,
But yet, as some other Greek explains,
The all is fasten'd with great chains,
And neither you nor I can dream
How this or that can slip from the Scheme:
Why ask of the dusk what it does with the dawn,
Or ask where the end of the circle has gone,
Or where into what the wind blows?
Yet this one questions of last year's snows,
This other, because of a wither'd rose,
Argues for me a blank to-morrow,
And, in the very light of dawn,
He bids me of his wine-cup borrow
What he resents—oblivion!
O great Omar! I bow to you,
And nod familiar to Villon,
But I have neither hope nor fear
O' being disperst in the atmosphere:
Oblivion—I wish there were
Such easy exit on the air,
Beyond desire, beyond regret,
And clearly out of anywhere:
To be, so far as we're concern'd,
An issue without sequence—nay
Too much of Nature's game we've learn'd
To credit that, I think, Omar!
Your rose has wither'd—well, that's clear;
But of itself 'twas a passing phase,
And may again on a day of the days
From the undistinguish'd mass appear,
As much itself as is itself
Now in the light of your partial eye:
And as for the snows of yester-year,
Why, every flake of them still is here:
No one of all has 'scaped from charge
In sea or sky or whirling storm:
So looking at it by and large
It seems entirely a matter of form:
There is no pit of nothingness
Wherein what is can e'er be less,
And we may say of everything
It is itself continuing:
The very shadows that we see
Are fast involved; 'tis a safe guess
No thing has been, no thing can be,
That is not now essentially;
And evermore we yet may hope
Within our little nets to rope
Some of that endless element
Of mystery and beauty blent
With the turning of God's kaleidoscope.