Now penitent at river's edge
Half way along a dead end street
There waits a soul behind his hedge
Whose days are but the winding-sheet
That gather, as in Passiontide,
What Time and Fate could not elide
And reckon there, in interpledge,
The toll of dreams now obsolete.
In brighter days of sunlit skies
He'd schemed, and dreamed of ripe renown
And plotted his path penny-wise
To breach the boundaries of the town
That all the world might know his name
And in the radiance of his flame
Know all his sight transmogrifies --
And then his dreams would tumble down.
A mind so keen and resolute
Seemed guaranteed its treasured goal,
But Destiny's forbidden fruit
Grew dark beside the wassail bowl
And so instead perfection's fool
Does penance on his ducking stool
And waits, a latter-day Canute,
For tides to turn on sandy shoal.
His blessed dream was but to teach
The majesty of Euclid's mind
But passion made him overreach
And thus repel those disinclined
To plumb in thoughts uncircumcised
Malignancies to be dispised;
But time and tide could not impeach
One disillusioned, left behind.
And so he traveled here and there
To share the shimmering of his grace
And then, in dark, the solitaire
Would twisted trails of doubt retrace
And find, in Saturn's harvest home,
The scythe, that like a metronome,
Would mark, for it could not repair,
What Atropos would soon erase.
And in the tumbling of Time's sands
Their reigned two sorts of gravity,
In marching spectral second hands
A chastening indignity --
And there can be no recompense
For debtors of improvidence
Whose tapestries' neat wefted strands
Ensnare all petty vanity.
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