Into which darkness all of us must go. I go untrammelled by mere selfishness, Conscious that many hopes converged on me, Till I became a symbol in men’s eyes; And still more conscious of the silent strife In mine own spirit when two courses lay Before me, and a voice cried: ‘Choose the best!’ By what I choose now let my soul abide. “One thing I learned, which is a part of hope With me: God knows how willing is man’s soul, Yet how his life is clouded o’er with doom, And hindered by innumerable things; So he will never judge by what I did, But read my soul, and know thence what I was, As no man knows me. Yet with tears I go; For I have loved the green lap of the earth, Its snowy toppling peaks with golden plumes Of sunset, or with sullen clouds of storm; Yea, I have loved the green fields of the earth, And the gray fields of the eternal sea, And night with its wide heavens, garlanded With the innumerable stars, the moon, Who sometimes like a blown sail in the sky, Voyages, or enchants with gentle beams Woodlands, and winding rivers, and still lakes. “And I have loved the seasons in their turn: Spring with her fragile flowers, virginal, Laughing beneath her coverlet of snow; Green Summer with her flocks of singing-birds, Cuckoos, and nightingales, and shrill-voiced lark, And swallows clamorous in crowded nests; Wild Autumn with his wind-swept avenues And fluttering of tawny golden leaves, His late warm ripeness in the apple-trees, The vagueness of his mourning, purple mists; And Winter, finally, with amber lights, His black boughs bare against the azure sky, Or on a gentle, rounded slope of woods, Clouded with purple bloom, his ivied trunks From which the lone owl calls with his deep voice, And, as the rooks pass homeward, overhead The multitudinous murmuring of wings. “All this I leave, and ways wherein my feet Have grown familiar, to voyage out Upon the darkness, void of any star. But in this little moment which is mine, While all my foes are sleeping, drunkenly, Among the dying lights, the broken meats, Which the dogs tear upon the rush-strewn floor While even the moonlight sleeps upon the hills, I build again, out of my memories, The storm and splendour of my troubled life. Even the narrow frontiers of this cell May in the crystal vision of the mind Hold my remembered royalty, and keep Dim memories of old magnificence, Pomp, courtly festivals, and crowded days, Of lovers who bent yearningly to me, Of poets, who made music at my touch As Memnon at the morning’s, of old kings Grave with their wisdom, and young warriors Whose wisdom was the lightness of their hearts; These haunt my solitude, and pay me court, Nor heed misfortune: but of all this state