| YOU that in vain would front the coming order | |
| With eyes that meet forlornly what they must, | |
| And only with a furtive recognition | |
| See dust where there is dust,— | |
| Be sure you like it always in your faces, | 5 |
| Obscuring your best graces, | |
| Blinding your speech and sight, | |
| Before you seek again your dusty places | |
| Where the old wrong seems right. | |
| |
| Longer ago than cave-men had their changes | 10 |
| Our fathers may have slain a son o two, | |
| Discouraging a further dialectic | |
| Regarding what was new; | |
| And after their unstudied admonition | |
| Occasional contrition | 15 |
| For their old-fashioned ways | |
| May have reduced their doubts, and in addition | |
| Softened their final days. | |
| |
| Farther away than feet shall ever travel. | |
| Are the vague towers of our unbuilded State; | 20 |
| But there are mightier things than we to lead us, | |
| That will not let us wait. | |
| And we go on with none to tell us whether | |
| Or not we’ve each a tether | |
| Determining how fast or how far we go; | 25 |
| And it is well, since we must go together, | |
| That we are not to know. | |
| |
| If the old wrong and all its injured glamour | |
| Haunts you by day and gives your night no peace, | |
| You may as well, agreeably and serenely, | 30 |
| Give the new wrong its lease; | |
| For should you nourish a too fervid yearning | |
| For what is not returning, | |
| The vicious and unfused ingredient | |
| May give you qualms—and one or two concerning | 35 |
| The last of your content. | |
