The greatest poem ever known <br />Is one all poets have outgrown: <br />The poetry, innate, untold, <br />Of being only four years old. <br /> <br />Still young enough to be a part <br />Of Nature's great impulsive heart, <br />Born comrade of bird, beast, and tree <br />And unselfconscious as the bee- <br /> <br />And yet with lovely reason skilled <br />Each day new paradise to build; <br />Elate explorer of each sense, <br />Without dismay, without pretense! <br /> <br />In your unstained transparent eyes <br />There is no conscience, no surprise: <br />Life's queer conundrums you accept, <br />Your strange divinity still kept. <br /> <br />Being, that now absorbs you, all <br />Harmonious, unit, integral, <br />Will shred into perplexing bits,- <br />Oh, contradictions of the wits! <br /> <br />And Life, that sets all things in rhyme, <br />may make you poet, too, in time- <br />But there were days, O tender elf, <br />When you were Poetry itself!<br /><br />Christopher Morley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-a-child-8/
