So mine are these new fruitings rich
     The simple to the common brings;
     I keep the youth of souls who pitch
     Their joy in this old heart of things: 

     Who feel the Coming young as aye,
     Thrice hopeful on the ground we plough;
     Alive for life, awake to die;
     One voice to cheer the seedling Now.

     Full lasting is the song, though he,
     The singer, passes:  lasting too,
     For souls not lent in usury,
     The rapture of the forward view.

     With that I bear my senses fraught
     Till what I am fast shoreward drives. 
     They are the vessel of the Thought. 
     The vessel splits, the Thought survives.

     Nought else are we when sailing brave,
     Save husks to raise and bid it burn. 
     Glimpse of its livingness will wave
     A light the senses can discern

     Across the river of the death,
     Their close.  Meanwhile, O twilight bird
     Of promise! bird of happy breath! 
     I hear, I would the City heard.

     The City of the smoky fray;
     A prodded ox, it drags and moans: 
     Its Morrow no man’s child; its Day
     A vulture’s morsel beaked to bones.

     It strives without a mark for strife;
     It feasts beside a famished host: 
     The loose restraint of wanton life,
     That threatened penance in the ghost!

     Yet there our battle urges; there
     Spring heroes many:  issuing thence,
     Names that should leave no vacant air
     For fresh delight in confidence.

     Life was to them the bag of grain,
     And Death the weedy harrow’s tooth. 
     Those warriors of the sighting brain
     Give worn Humanity new youth.

     Our song and star are they to lead
     The tidal multitude and blind
     From bestial to the higher breed
     By fighting souls of love divined,

     They scorned the ventral dream of peace,
     Unknown in nature.  This they knew: 
     That life begets with fair increase
     Beyond the flesh, if life be true.

     Just reason based on valiant blood,
     The instinct bred afield would match
     To pipe thereof a swelling flood,
     Were men of Earth made wise in watch.

     Though now the numbers count as drops
     An urn might bear, they father Time. 
     She shapes anew her dusty crops;
     Her quick in their own likeness climb.

     Of their own force do they create;
     They climb to light, in her their root. 
     Your brutish cry at muffled fate
     She smites with pangs of worse than brute.

     She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears
     A Mother whom no cry can melt;
     But read her past desires and fears,
     The letters on her breast are spelt.

     A slayer, yea, as when she pressed
     Her savage to the slaughter-heaps,
     To sacrifice she prompts her best: 
     She reaps them as the sower reaps.