To My Son
By John Drinkwater
(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.