The Second Law.

And is our Earth,
And the shuddering stars sown round it,
And the frozen waste of tractless void beyond.
To pass, to crash like the boom of the sea-surge?
And are man's hopes,
And the dreams he dares not dream,
But to dissolve in mindless emptiness?
So they have said . . .
A tree bursts up, green, fresh as a dew-wet flower.
But its molten gold leaves drip fast to the ground,
And its trunk grows gnarled like a sailor's hand,
It is withered and old.
But a poet has sung of the golden tree,
And lovers have rested beneath its shade,
And it does not die!
I heard a bird sing once. in the silent twilight,
Strange, swelling songs of things unknowable,
But I knew, as I stood in the quivering dusk—
Things do not die!
Though all eternity shall roll away.
I know,—
We do not die!