Poems (Hardy)/Go forth and teach
GO FORTH AND TEACH
WHEN thou hast finer morals than the beech,
More inward grace than elm, nor less
Of outward patience, then go forth and teach
The hurrying city of thy graciousness
Enough to salt its bread and reach
Its blood and drive it, under stress,
To higher impulse, nobler thought and speech.
More inward grace than elm, nor less
Of outward patience, then go forth and teach
The hurrying city of thy graciousness
Enough to salt its bread and reach
Its 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 pass
Through channels wrought by equal cause
To broader fields of sequence; skies of brass
Nor desert earth shall make thee pause
Ere thou, thyself, shalt treasure great amass.
Hast mastered for thyself its book of laws,
Then set the currents of thy life to pass
Through channels wrought by equal cause
To broader fields of sequence; skies of brass
Nor desert earth shall make thee pause
Ere 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 breaks
Some loaf of life, and, holding thus the key
Of soul-relation to all life, it takes
Its joy from self-forgetting ministry.
As, worthy to itself, itself it makes;
That worth unto itself through this must be:
That to its neighbor, high or low, it breaks
Some loaf of life, and, holding thus the key
Of soul-relation to all life, it takes
Its joy from self-forgetting ministry.