Classic Poem

Upon a grave your cradle stands,
Lo, Life and Death
Commingled breath
And wedded hands,
As in the lap of Time you lay,
And the old Century passed away.

And strangely in your soul are wed
The young and old,
The warm and cold,
The quick and dead;
And past and future, fruit and bud,
Make Spring and Autumn of your blood.

Art thou not old who at thy birth
Inheritest
From east to west
The ancient Earth,
With its black burden of despair,
Its garb of grief, its crown of care?

Art thou not old? The Past survives,
Living in thee
Recurrently
Its pallid lives.
Are not thy crimson roses fed
With the grey ashes of the dead?

Thine aged eyes, with backward gaze,
Can see amid,
Hot vapour hid,
The First of Days,
When from the fire-mist fringe was hurled
The hissing, spinning, splendid world.

As old as wrinkled Sin thou art,
And all the eld
Sin ever held
Is in thy heart.
Though thou an infant form assume,
Thy soul was senile in the womb.

And beldame Time with dotard hands,
Mockingly made
Of shrouds decayed
Thy swaddling-bands,
And scented them with musk and myrrh,
And odours of the sepulchre.

And yet thy heart is warm with youth,
While stellar space
Has novel grace,
And nascent truth,
And many an undiscovered star
And undescended Avatar.

Oh, young thou art, who canst delete
Or cover sorrows
With to-morrows,
Bright and sweet,
Counting as an unwritten scroll
The palimpsest of thy soul.

And young thou art who see no end,
And hast in view
The Good whereto
All changes tend!
What frost of age can ever blight
The Amaranth of the Infinite?

Youth blossoms in the fervid blood,
As Aaron's rod
Instinct with God
Broke into bud.
And these worm-eaten swaddling clothes
Are but the sepals of a rose.

And even Sin's distorted root
Will some day bear,
Thro' saving prayer,
A holy fruit.
Out of old Sin God's Love will make
New Beauty for His Mercy's sake.

Thy spirit is as fresh as dew,
So sweet and warm,
It can transform
The old to new,
And make the muscles move upon
The driest bones in Aijalon.

Oh, young thou art in heart and will,
Thy lips can pray,
Thy cheeks display
The dimples still.
Must not the moments lusty be
Whose loins contain Eternity?

Oh, strangely in thy soul are wed
The young and old,
The warm and cold,
The quick and dead,
And both the future and the past
Within thine infant veins thou hast.