The Children

After our long and not too splendid proem,
After the ghastly night,
Dear children, you are going to write the poem
We could not write.

There will be in it dogwood never lost,
For all the ill we did,
White shoals of music in seas by us uncrossed,
Our future hid.

You will declare these things to who come after,
Past even your presaging,
Who will, perhaps, not understand your laughter
More than our raging.

Yet do not mock us. We are the mad, whose madness
Loosed what was not desired
By us, who now must disappear in sadness,
Embittered, tired.

Though, in our failure, never at all forgetting
What it is that endures,
We, by prevision, while our sun was setting,
Imagined yours,

And so are not so utterly defeated
As it, perhaps, might seem
To them, who, on the thrones we dreamed of, seated,
Shall live our dream.