Man Coming of Age

What rime, what tinsel pure and chill,

By dawn adorns the new-spied hill?

This brilliance in the night was wrought:

From cold and dark a dead world caught

Such light that glitters past our thought.

So settles on a dying face,

After the retch and spasm, grace.

(A grace like that did not belong

In the room of no-love, fret, and wrong:

The watchers sat heavy, night was long.)

Now standing on his own doorsill,

He views the woods that crest the hill,

And asks: "Was it I who roamed to prove

My heart beneath the unwhispering grove

In season greener and of more love?"

And was it he? Now let him stride

With crampéd knee the slant hillside,

Pondering what paths he used to know,

Seeking under the snowy bough

That frail deceitful alter ego.

Wanderer in woods that bear no leaf,

Climber of rocks, assume your grief,

And go! lest he, before you tread

That ground once sweetly tenanted,

Like mist down the glassy glooms be fled.