A Childhood

I am glad I met you on the edge

Of your barbarous childhood

In what purity of pleasure

You danced alone like a peasant

For the stamping joy's own sake!

How, set in their sandy sockets,

Your clear, truthful, transparent eyes

Shone out of the black frozen landscape

Of those gray-clothed schoolboys!

How your shy hand offered

The total generosity

Of original unforewarned fearful trust,

In a world grown old in iron hatred!

I am glad to set down

The first and ultimate you,

Your inescapable soul. Although

It fade like a fading smile

Or light falling from faces

Which some grimmer preoccupation replaces.

This happens everywhere at every time:

Joy lacks the cause for joy,

Love the answering love,

And truth the objectless persistent loneliness,

As they grow older,

To become later what they were

In childhood earlier,

In a world of cheating compromise.

Childhood, its own flower,

Flushes from the grasses with no reason

Except the sky of that season.

But the grown desires need objects

And taste of these corrupts the tongue

And the natural need is scattered

In satisfactions which satisfy

A debased need.

Yet all prayers are on die side of

Giving strength to naturalness,

So I pray for nothing new,

I pray only, after such knowledge,

That you may have the strength to be you.

And I shall remember

You who, being younger,

Will probably forget.