Poems (Hardy)/Go forth and teach
GO FORTH AND TEACH
WHEN thou hast finer morals than the beech,More inward grace than elm, nor lessOf outward patience, then go forth and teachThe hurrying city of thy graciousnessEnough to salt its bread and reachIts blood and drive it, under stress,To higher impulse, nobler thought and speech.
When thou hast learned its leisure of the grass,Hast mastered for thyself its book of laws,Then set the currents of thy life to passThrough channels wrought by equal causeTo broader fields of sequence; skies of brassNor desert earth shall make thee pauseEre thou, thyself, shalt treasure great amass.
Then thou shalt know that life holds all in fee,As, worthy to itself, itself it makes;That worth unto itself through this must be:That to its neighbor, high or low, it breaksSome loaf of life, and, holding thus the keyOf soul-relation to all life, it takesIts joy from self-forgetting ministry.