Youth is all valiant. He and I together, Conscious of strength, and unreproved of wrong, Strained at the world's conventions as a tether Too weak to bind us, and burst forth in song. The backs of fools we scourged as with a thong, And falsehood stripped to its last borrowed feather, And vowed to fact what things to fact belong, And of the rest asked neither why nor whether. Gravely we triumphed in that Gorgon time, Unsexed for us at length thro' lack of faith, Our barren mistress, from whose womb sublime No beauty more should spring, but only death. Like birds we sang by some volcanic brink, Leaning on ugliness, and did not shrink. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SONG OF NATURE by RALPH WALDO EMERSON BOSTON COMMON: 1774 by OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES THE DAUGHTER OF MENDOZA by MIRABEAU BONAPARTE LAMAR FOR [OR TO] THOSE WHO FAIL by CINCINNATUS HEINE MILLER MY HAPPINESS by JOHANNA AMBROSIUS MASQUE AT THE MARRIAGE OF THE LORD HAYES: FLORA SPEAKS by THOMAS CAMPION |