Classic Poem

The failure to go far enough
When the intention was a promise
Never to stop before the reaching of
Death either or a perfect end —
Wayside such beauties and such lapses,
Such gods and flowers, cities, nations;
And the achievement's name,
Though spoken with a loving certainty,
Evokes no other truth than Tiredness.

For, forget not that you have promised,
By the book of flesh sworn oaths
And been admitted by your body's word
Into life, the first and last trying-place.
You are pledged to do or to die.
And if, between doing or dying,
A partial comfort rises up like refuge
From hard interminable course,
So builds itself a perjuring world.

And this must pass. Division into bones,
And finer crumbling, as in the faithful woods
A fertile mantle is of what the trees shed —
Until, after the dark enrichment
Of the earth of hope with ruin-mould,
Intention has death's consequence
And your memory is instructed,
By a benignant pang of unreproach,
What your designs and your promises were.