To My Son

(AGED SIXTEEN)     Dear boy unborn: the son but of my dream,         Promise of yet unrisen day,     Come, sit beside me; let us talk, and seem         To take such cares and courage for your way,         As some year yet we may.     As some year yet, when you, my son to be,         Look out on life, and turn to go,     And I, grown grey, shall wish you well, and see         Myself imprinted as but she could know         To make amendment so.     I see you then, your sixteen years alight         With limbs all true and golden hair,     And you, unborn, I will, this April night,         Tell of the faith and honour you must wear         For love, whose light you bear.     Beauty you have; as, mothered so, could face         Or limbs or hair be otherwise?     Years gone, dear boy, there was a virgin grace         Worth Homer's laurel under western skies         To wander and devise.     Beauty you have. Cherish it as divine,         Wash it with dews of diligence,     Not vainly, but because it is the sign         Of inward light, the spirit's excellence         Made visible to sense.     Athlete be you; strong runner to the goal,         Glad though the game be lost or won:     Fleet limbs that chronicle a fleeter soul,         In every winter valiantly to run,         Till the last race be done.     Love wisdom that is suited in a rhyme,         And be in all your learning known     Old minstrels chanting out of faded time,         Since he who counts all years gone by alone         Makes any year his own.     And when one day you are a lover too,         Come back to her who bore you, dear,     Tell out your tale; you shall the better woo         For every word that from her lips you hear,         For she made love most clear.     Most clear for him who sits beside you now;         There was a certain frost that fell     Before its time upon a summer bough,,         And how at last that reckoning was well,         She for your love shall tell.     Labour to build your house, but ever keep         That greater garden fresh in mind,     That England with its bird-song buried deep         In cool great woods where chivalry can find         The province of its kind.     Be great or little your inheritance,         Know there shall number in that dower     No treasure from the treasuries of chance         So rare as that you came the perfect flower         Of love's most perfect hour.     Go now, my son. Be all I might have been.         (Ask her. She knows, and none but she.)     Her beauty and her wisdom weathered clean         Some part of me in you, that you might be         Her own eternity.