From your short time of gladnes in fair weather When day and night before your eyes are drawn And sun and star, arising, share together The triumph and the meekness of their dawn, And sweet earth breathes with sounds of life achieving, And bird and bee and herd are on the hill, And broad noon is gracious past believing With peace of sun and grass, and fear is still -- You shall come then to a lost December, Into the whip and stillness of the snow, When the failing year's last glowing ember Fades to white ash of winter, and you know How cold, how hard, the heartless breast of winter Is to your numbed and lonely selves that go Each fruitless to your house where but the splinter Of a frozen star is, ice, before your low Unhaunted window, where each of you shall see Earth shut against you, sky forbidden, traceless, Where flowers of flame of absent days may be Hung visions for such as you forever placeless -- There in the stillness, cold, futility Of faith, awaits you now the final labour, The venture of the farthest thrust from dearth Of soul, with your almost despairing sabre, Into space that is but hope unleashed from earth -- The steeling of your gladness in fair weather To bravery as sun and flower are brave, So that with sod and star you share together The triumph and the meekness of the grave. |