Classic Poem

Here is the world's end. When our fathers forded the first river in Asia we crossed the world's end;
And when the North Sea throbbed under their keels, the world's end;
And when the Atlantic surge rolled English oak in the sea-trough: always there was farther to go,
A new world piecing out the old one: but ours, our new world?
Dark and enormous rolls the surf; down on the mystical tide-line under the cliffs at moonset
Dead tribes move, remembering the scent of their hills, the lost hunters
Our fathers hunted; they driven westward died the sun's death, they dread the depth and hang at the land's hem,
And are unavenged; frail ghosts, and ghostlike in their lives too,
Having only a simple hunger for all our complication of desires. Dark and enormous
Rolls the surf of the far storms of the heart of the ocean;
The old granite breaks into white torches the heavy-shouldered children of the wind ... our ancient wanderings
West from the world's birth what sea-bound breaking shall flame up torchlike?
I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration's
End; the sun goes on but we have come up to an end.
We have climbed at length to a height, to an end, this end: shall we go down again to Mother Asia?
Some of us will go down, some will abide, but we sought
More than to return to a mother. This huge, inhuman, remote, unruled, this ocean will show us
The inhuman road, the unruled attempt, the remote lode-star.
The torch-bearers' race: it is run in a dusk; when the emptied racer drops unseen at the end of his course
A fresh hand snatches the hilt of the light, the torch flies onward
Though the man die. Not a runner knows where the light was lighted, not a runner knows where it carries fire to,
Hand kisses hand in the dark, the torch passes, the man
Falls, and the torch passes. It gleamed across Euphrates mud, shone on Nile shore, it lightened
The little homely Ionian water and the sweet Aegean.
O perfect breathing of the runners, those narrow courses, names like the stars' names, Sappho, Alcaeus,
And Aeschylus a name like the first eagle's; but the torch westering.
The seas widened, the earth's bloom hardened, the stone rose Rome seeding the earth, but the torch northering
Lightened the Atlantic ... O flame, O beauty and shower of beauty,
There is yet one ocean and then no more, God whom you shine to walks there naked, on the final Pacific,
Not in a man's form.

The torch answered: Have I kindled a morning?
For again, this old world's end is the gate of a world fire-new, of your wild future, wild as a hawk's dream,
Ways hung on nothing, like stars, feet shaking earth off; that long way
Was a labor in a dream, will you wake now? The eaglets rustle in the aerie, the red eyes of dawn stabbing up through the nest-side,
You have walked in a dream, consumed with your fathers and your mothers, you have loved
Inside the four walls of humanity, passions turned inward, incestuous desires and a fighting against ghosts, but the clarions
Of light have called morning.

What, not to be tangled any more in the blinding
Rays of reflected desire, the man with the woman, the woman with the child, the daughter with the father, but freed
Of the web self-woven, the burning and the blistering strands running inward?
Those rays to be lightened awide, to shine up the star-path, subduing the world outward? Oh chicks in the high nest be fledged now,
Having found out flight in the air to make wing to the height, fierce eye-flames
Of the eaglets be strengthened, to drink of the fountain of the beauty of the sun of the stars, and to gaze in his face, not a father's,
And motherless and terrible and here.

But I at the gate, I falling
On the gate-sill add this: When the ancient wisdom is folded like a wine-stained cloth and laid up in darkness,
And the old symbols forgotten, in the glory of that your hawk's dream
Remember that the life of mankind is like the life of a man, a flutter from darkness to darkness
Across the bright hair of a fire, so much of the ancient
Knowledge will not be annulled. What unimaginable opponent to end you?

There is one fountain
Of power, yours and that last opponent's, and of long peace.