“Sign of a changing world.  And change I fear. 
  I have seen old and young like brief gnats die,
And have faced death by plague and flood and spear: 
  I have seen mine own familiar people lie
In generations reaped; and near and near
  Age leads on Death—­I hear his husky sigh. 
Yet Death I fear not, but these clouds of change
Sweeping the old firm world with new and strange.

“Son of my son, to whom the world shines new,
  You are strange to me for whom the world is old. 
Your thoughts are not my thoughts, and unto you
  The past, sole warmth for me, is void and cold. 
Another passion pours your spirit through,
  Another faith has leapt upon the fold
And wrestles with the ancient faith.  ‘And lo!’
Lightly men say, ‘Even the gods come and go!’”

He paused awhile in pacing and hung still,
  Amid the thickening shades a darker shade. 
Down the steep valley from the barren hill
  A herd of deer with antlered leader made
Brief apparition.  Mist brimmed up until
  Only the great round heights yet solid stayed—­
Then they too changed to spectral, and upon
The changing mist wavered, and were gone....

“Standing to-day your father’s grave beside,
  I knew my heart with his was covered there;
O, more than flesh did in the cold earth hide—­
  My past, his promise.  There was none to care
Save for the body of a prince that died
  As princes die; there was none whispered, ’Where
Moves now among us his unburied part? 
What breast beats with the pulses of his heart?’

“—­Vain thoughts are these that but a dying man
  Searches among the dark caves of his mind! 
But as I stood, the very wind that ran
  Between the files breathed more than common wind,
As though the gods of men when Time began,
  Fathers of fathers of old humankind,
Startled, heard now the changeful future knock;
And their lament it was from rock to rock

“Tossed with the wind’s long echo ...  O, speak not,
  Nor tell me with my loss I am so dazed,
That my tongue speaks unfaithfully my thought;
  That you, you too, within his shadow raised,
Stand bare now, wanting all you held or thought,
  By aimless love or prisoned grief amazed. 
Tell me not:  let me out of silence speak,
Or let me still my thoughts in silence break.”

And so both stood, and not a word to say,
  By silence overborne, until at last
The young man breathed, “Look how the end of day
  Falls heavily, as though the earth were cast
Into a shapeless soundless pit, where ray
  Of heavenly light never the verge has past. 
Yet will the late moon’s light anon shine here,
And then gray light, and then the sun’s light clear.

“Sire, ’twas my father died, and like night’s pit
  Soundless and shapeless yawn my orphaned years. 
And yet I know morn comes and brings with it
  Old tasks again, and new joys, hopes and fears. 
Or sword or plough these fingers will find fit,
  And morrows end with other cries and tears,
With women’s arms and children’s voices and
The sacred gods blessing the new-sown land.