Since thirty mornings are required to make A day of which we say, this is the day That we desired, a day of blank, blue wheels, Involving the four corners of the sky, Lapised and lacqued and freely emeraldine In the space it fills, the silent motioner There, of clear, revolving crystalline, Since thirty summers are needed for a year And thirty years, in the galaxies of birth, Are time for counting and remembering, And fill the earth with young men centuries old And old men, who have chosen, and are cold Because what they have chosen is their choice No more and because they lack the will to tell A matin gold from gold of Hesperus The dot, the pale pole of resemblances Experienced yet not well seen, of how
Much choosing is the final choice made up, And who shall speak it, what child or wanderer Or woman weeping in a room or man, The last man given for epitome, Upon whose lips the dissertation sounds, And in what place, what exultant terminal, And at what time both of the year and day; And what heroic nature of what text Shall be the celebration in the words Of that oration, the happiest sense in which A world agrees, thought's compromise, resolved At last, the center of resemblance, found Under the bones of time's philosophers? The orator will say that we ourselves Stand at the center of ideal time, The inhuman making choice of a human self.