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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. IN EXTREME AGE, by EDWARD CARPENTER Poet's Biography
First Line: Unto thee, o nature, I abandon myself
Last Line: And I and thou are one, and I alone am not.
Subject(s): Old Age
First Line: Unto thee, o nature, I abandon myself
Last Line: And I and thou are one, and I alone am not.
Subject(s): Old Age
UNTO Thee, O Nature, I abandon myself:
Accept me, thou beautiful,
Marred and deformed and stunted take me from myself
Unto thy own great uses.
Lo, I outgrow this body! painfully
My life ebbs yet and flows again within it.
These hands and feet, these eyes and brain, these senses, faculties, have
served their turn—
The dinted tools I render back to Thee.
As when a boy I sat upon the beach in the sun, and watched the sparkling
waves,
So now in extreme age sitting here
I trace no change—scarce any change at all.
Some little work done, some formal knowledge gained, some passages of sweet
or sad experience;
But all these only outworks, falling off,
Leave me the same that I have been through life.
(So little one life—so brief, slight, a thing.)
Till now at length, feeling Thee gather round me close,
Close, closer, closer yet,
At last the bounds dissolve which kept us twain,
And I and Thou are one, and I alone am not.
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