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Home  »  The New Poetry  »  Old Age

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Old Age

By Percy Mackaye

OLD AGE, the irrigator,

Digs our bosoms straighter,

More workable and deeper still

To turn the ever-running mill

Of nights and days. He makes a trough

To drain our passions off,

That used so beautiful to lie

Variegated to the sky,

On waste moorlands of the heart—

Haunts of idleness, and art

Still half-dreaming. All their piedness

Rank and wild and shallow wideness,

Desultory splendors, he

Straightens conscientiously

To a practicable sluice

Meant for workaday, plain use.

All the mists of early dawn,

Twilit marshes, being gone

With their glamor, and their stench,

There is left—a narrow trench.