Life and Existence

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together.

We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air.

We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers, Leastways if you reckon two thumbs; Long ago he was one of the singers, But now he is one of the dumbs.

Have you found your life distasteful? My life did and does smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I’ll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again.

Out of the wreck I rise.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life’s business being just the terrible choice.

You never know what life means till you die: Even throughout life, ’tis death that makes life live, Gives it whatever the significance.

You never know what life means till you die: Even throughout life, ’tis death that makes life live, Gives it whatever the significance.

Through such souls alone God stooping shows sufficient of His light For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.

We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.

Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face.

How sad and bad and mad it was— But then, how it was sweet!

The best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy.

Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone, Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are; Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! ’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.

Therefore I summon age To grant youth’s heritage.

What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me.

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard.

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s ultimate gift, That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift?

In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.