Youth is all valiant. He and I together, <br />Conscious of strength, and unreproved of wrong, <br />Strained at the world's conventions as a tether <br />Too weak to bind us, and burst forth in song. <br />The backs of fools we scourged as with a thong, <br />And falsehood stripped to its last borrowed feather, <br />And vowed to fact what things to fact belong, <br />And of the rest asked neither why nor whether. <br />Gravely we triumphed in that Gorgon time, <br />Unsexed for us at length thro' lack of faith, <br />Our barren mistress, from whose womb sublime <br />No beauty more should spring, but only death. <br />Like birds we sang by some volcanic brink, <br />Leaning on ugliness, and did not shrink.<br /><br />Wilfrid Scawen Blunt<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-new-pilgrimage-sonnet-xxvi/
