Coming Down

His triumph is not yet the looked-for glory:

To breathe is pain enough, a loneliness,

Though the world ought to matter more than this

White island in a sea of cumulus.

With nothing new to tell, no simple story

Of some magnificence-a curve of earth,

The sense of space-the venture is not worth

The last convulsive struggle for the crown,

Ice piled on ice above the naked rock.

The summit lacked the features of a town,

For all its truth and whiteness. Coming down,

The climber looks for houses and for fields,

For evidence of man, as for a prize

More wonderful than honors or the praise

Of those who were not with him then to gaze

From the unimagined summit at the vast

Imagined light below them. But he tries,

Reading the disappointment in their eyes,

To tell them what it was by looking back

To where the snow and clouds close in as blind

And meaningless as all his hopes had proved

When he reached the broken top and so defined

Another aspect of the finite world.

Almost too eager now for change, the known

Waste of familiar valleys, he contrives

A kind of figure for the frozen mind.

He stoops to touch the lichen on the stone,

As tough as leather; and the will revives.