The Golden Darkness/But Now

BUT NOW.

I shall not be I when the sky shall fall in folds
Among as yet unrisen grandeured hills;
When the ocean shall have gathered in ungathered sorrows,
Drawing in his wide net of rivers and rills.

I shall not be I when the starlight shall have swept away
Mighty waves of greenery unpulsing as yet,
When darkness shall be a kind face, silence a soft voice,
And souls shall remember and never care to forget.

I shall not be I when the loneliness of loneliness
Shall have stolen back to dead space never to come again,
And beauty shall rise, as it has never yet, out of dawns and rains,
And all the strange stirrings in the hearts of men.

But now that I am I, with the expectant eyes of the dead
In the thronged and waiting darkness looking at me,
With so much beauty wiser and so much love greater,
And just so many more shadows venturing from the sea;—

Now that I am I, never, never to be so again,
Now that I am at the height and the glory of a self,
I must ache and despair and work and aspire
For a little dust on a shelf!