It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among
these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and
dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and
feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times
I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That
loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy
Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with
a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And
manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but
honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far
on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch
wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For
ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an
end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe
were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to
me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal
silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it
were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray
spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking
star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the
sceptre and the isle–
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This
labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft
degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is
he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In
offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household
gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There
gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and
wrought, and thought with me–
That ever with a frolic welcome
took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free
foreheads–you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his
toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of
noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with
Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day
wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off,
and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose
holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western
stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It
may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom
we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now
that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we
are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time
and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield.