| |
| HAST thou no right to joy, | |
| O youth grown old! who palest with the thought | |
| Of the measureless annoy, | |
| The pain and havoc wrought | |
| By Fate on man: and of the many men, | 5 |
| The unfed, the untaught, | |
| Who groan beneath that adamantine chain | |
| Whose tightness kills, whose slackness whips the flow | |
| Of waves of futile woe: | |
| Hast thou no right to joy? | 10 |
| |
| Thou thinkest in thy mind | |
| In thee it were unkind | |
| To revel in the liquid Hyblian store, | |
| While more and more the horror and the shame, | |
| The pity and the woe grow more and more, | 15 |
| Persistent still to claim | |
| The filling of thy mind. | |
| |
| Thou thinkest that, if none in all the rout | |
| Who compass thee about | |
| Turn full their soul to that which thou desirest, | 20 |
| Nor seek to gain thy goal, | |
| Beauty, the heart of beauty, | |
| The sweetness, yea, the thoughtful sweetness, | |
| The one right way in each, the best, | |
| Which satisfies the soul, | 25 |
| The firmness lost in softness, touch of typical meetness, | |
| Which lets the soul have rest; | |
| Those things to which thyself aspirest:— | |
| That they, though born to quaff the bowl divine, | |
| AS thou art, yield to the strict law of duty; | 30 |
| And thou from them must thine example take, | |
| Leave the amaranthine vine, | |
| And the prized joy forsake. | |
| |
| O thou, foregone in this, | |
| Long struggling with a world that is amiss, | 35 |
| Reach some old volume down, | |
| Some poet’s book, which in thy bygone years | |
| Thou hast consum’d with joys as keen as fears, | |
| When o’er it thou wouldst hang with rapturous frown, | |
| Admiring with sweet envy all | 40 |
| The exquisite of words, the lance-like fall | |
| Of mighty verses, each on each, | |
| The sweetness which did never cloy, | |
| (So wrought with thought ere touch’d with speech), | |
| And ask again, Hast thou no right to joy? | 45 |
| Take the most precious tones that thunder-struck thine ears | |
| In gentler days gone by: | |
| And if they yield no more the old ecstasy, | |
| Then give thyself to tears. | |
| |
