Classic Poem

We have all resigned ourselves,
Because of what we have,
To what we have not.
We have each made peace
With his extravagance
And are each content
With the penury we knew at first.
The rest is a giant we loved
Before we grew up
And thought to be large as
Because growth like an hour
Waxed daylong to yearlong
Without threat of surfeit
Or cessation of clock.

Then we were small.
The giant turned nonsensical.
We abhorred the gibberish of it
As it stumbled alien and incredible
Along the ragged margin of proportion.
We no longer twined
Magnitude with heart's bound.
Our hearts grew small.
Time has no other way than increase,
But we are shrunken
As defeat reduces
From surly swell
Into a laced accustomedness.

We have none prospered
In the rhapsodic vigours
Which infinity supplies
To our exhaustion
At the circling round of age
To continuity again
Of growing older.
We have grown older,
But let progression wither
Into the ancient dwarf,
Which stubborn to delirium
Draws in the skein of greed
And makes a knotted prime
Of gianthood averted.

We are then as we were,
And forgive ourselves
This meeting in a lesser state
Than vows of last reunion meant.
Some, scowling, think it is a fault
In us, who lay the giant
In so soon a grave
Lest abjuration stink too loud
Of early vehemence.
Some have not noticed
That we are become
These miniatures of fortune—
Truly, there is no need for all to look
Into the moderating mirror.
And some, delighting even
In monstrous probability's depletion,
Forget they are the characters
Of this impoverished drama
And stand like wags of pathos
Watching their own funeral wind
Amidst the quaint irreverence
Of business faces and traffic rules.

But we who feel the forced recoil
From perchance brimming madness,
Gasping the required universe
In serene desperation—
We are the slavish masters
Of necessity;
It is we who exacted
Transcendence from chance,
And we who exact now
The measure's gross ebb.
We are profoundly dashed
By the commonplaceness
Of the universal result
And profoundly stirred
To be constrained to own
Reality for ourselves.