After the Game

WHAT is it, Youth, that I regret?
Master of gifts, and leaving none?
Is it the feet that lightly set
Their print where mountain-brows were wet
With dewy mirrors of the moon?
Bearing a soul importunate
To smite the blue sky stone that is the gods’ shut gate?

Or mourn I most that braver day,
Imperious, and periling
High hope that went the gauntlet way
Past flame and spear, where whitely lay The trials of vision challenging?
Unfearing hope, enraptured driven,
To set drab tents of man fair on a ridge of heaven?

When destiny, struck by desire,
Rang back, a bell of magic tone?
When love let no man walk alone,
And every heart held altar-fire,
For every heart was yet my own
That grew, as flames grow, round the earth
With fast exultant beat of multitudinous birth?

Or dearer aches my loss when shy
Ghost hours lead to an idle brook,
Where, pale with song’s sped shaft, I lie,
And with eternal wonder look
Upon a moth-wing’s brevity,
Careless against the infinite
Heaven of a leaf, and tremble watching it?

Regret, O bee that comes with age
From faded fields to sling again
To pain’s swift red the heritage
That once was April light to men,
When will you coldly pass me? when
Leave me to twilight and the dumb,
Strange gaze of stars that care not who may go or come?