One after one the high emotions fade; <br />Time's wheeling measure empties and refills <br />Year after year; we seek no more the hills <br />That lured our youth divine and unafraid, <br />But swarming on some common highway, made <br />Beaten and smooth, plod onward with blind feet <br />And only where the crowded crossways meet <br />We halt and question, anxious and dismayed. <br />Yet can we not escape it; some we know <br />Have angered and grown mad, some scornfully laughed; <br />Yet surely to each lip--to mine to thin-- <br />Comes with strange scent and pallid poisonous glow <br />The cup of Life, that dull Circean draught, <br />That taints us all, and turns the half to swine.<br /><br />Archibald Lampman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-cup-of-life-2/
