A Lost World

To make us mindful boys, the college chime
Rang all the while — it was the college will;
It sang the silver measurement of time,
And our young curses rang more silver still.

Then say that we were bells cast into flesh,
And every wind that rustled in our blood
Stirred in our skulls clear poignant chimes and fresh,
And poured them out a brilliant dreamful flood.

But now this wisdom sits upon our lips,
And smart reserve has caked us up with mould;
The wind dies down to little breezy quips,
And not a hand can ring us, soft or bold.

Or if chance wakes our resonance again,
We clang the dull and sodden speech of men.

What is this liberty of which they speak?
They do not know: but we, the trifiers, knew,
And while that dream of slaves grew old and weak,
We drank of liberty the noble brew.

They talked of truth; strange men played with the word,
And rained illusions on our innocence,
And each one than the other more absurd.
They did their best in kindly impotence —

The president, and deans, and all their crew;
And some were bold, some wistful, and some mean,
But none could touch the quick, because we knew
That candid rowdy truth which we had seen.

We sought not liberty, nor cared for truth —
And so they came to us once, in our youth.

It was an earthly place, but strangely made
Because it slept unruffled by the cold
Immutable ironic serenade,
The legal song of time, and food, and gold.

It lay beneath our common sky and yet
It was another world, a place called Yale,
A fancy land, wherein there daily met
Old pungent human dust and youth, the frail.

We lived there once, and then across our days
Strode death, a masquerader capped and gowned,
And we, the boys whom nothing could amaze,
Stepped downward into life and so were drowned.

Quite gone — and there is only left behind
A dream of misty elms to plague the mind.