Growing Old

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength....
Not our bloom only but our strength......decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer every function less exact
Each nerve more weakly strung?
Yes this and more but not
Ah tis not what in youth we dreamed twould be
Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow
A golden day's decline

Tis not to see the world
As from a height with rapt prophetic eyes
And heart profoundly stirred
And weep and feel the fulness 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 our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change
But no emotion none.

It is last stage of all
When we are frozen up within and quite
The phantom of ourselves
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.