Growing old

Growing old


What is it to grow old?
First, we lose the glory of the form,
Then luster of the eyes?
The beauty is to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength go
Not our bloom only, but our strength shall decay?
Is it to feel each limb waken
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'not what in youth we had dreamed 'would be!
'It’s not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!

It’s not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are no more!

It is to spend long days.
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured.
In the hot prison of the present month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in the hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion -none.

This is -the last stage of all -
When we are frozen up within, and quite
In the phantom of ourselves,
Hearing the world applaud to the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.