Destiny and Overcoming

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

The longest journey Is the journey inwards Of him who has chosen his destiny.

The only freedom the gods grant us Of our own free will to their sovereignty. Since only in the illusion of freedom

By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the strong shall thrive; That surely the weak shall perish, and only the fit survive. Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, This is the Will of the Yukon—Lo, how she makes it plain!

Have I not walked without an upward look Of caution under stars that very well Might not have missed me when they shot and fell? It was a risk I had to take—and took.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same.

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

What of the Immanent Will and its designs? It works unconsciously as heretofore, External artistries in circumstance.

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play; Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through.

Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

It’s a long lane that knows no turnings.

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.