When I Was Twenty

WHEN I was twenty and a man of promise,
Innocent of time, at ease with it,
Nowhere by moonlight, I remember this
Friend of mine who said — he was explicit —
I’d do my best work in the next ten years.
Even though he spoke, of course I knew,
Less of my than his expected cheers,
Designing epics when my rhymes were through.
Thirty wakes me — and what have I done?
Shelley and Keats are younger now than I,
Chatterton’s a child sure of the sun,
Only Yeats and Hardy comfort me:
These days, a river darkening and slow —
The nights a dream of it fired in the snow.

Memory of young and living nakedness:
O when I was twenty and in love,
Doped by day and half the night sleepless,
Doomed and saved and dazed and waked by love:
And, of course, moneyless for love and houseless,
Sure that earlier passions had not been love,
Swept back and forth from tenderness to madness
To eat and breathe and think my love, my love —
Not to possess her each day: not to possess
Her surety and fidelity as proved,
And every hour I could not see her, guess
A hundred men might see her and be moved.
At thirty, I wonder for a moment where
She is, how gold is all that golden hair.