The Basic Tenets

The basic tenets of my faith

Remain, though time has blunted all

The finer points I once embraced

By casting doubts beyond my trawl.

 

For now a sober Saturn sets

Its nets at my small sanity,

While I remain obsessed with things

That ravage this mortality.

 

Time teases man a little way

Then casts him out, adrift in space

As if his grace were nothing blessed

And all his dignity but waste.

 

And it is this that most appals

The cultured mind, the man within

Who weaves long patterns through short dreams

That he conceives, but may not spin.

 

That he conceives, and yet must leave

In ruin at his final breath

While others pick his patterns clean

And tread, like him, his dreams to death!

 

David Lewis Paget