PROEM

He who hath never from behind toothed wire Glimpsed, helpless, freedom’s waiting amplitude, Hath never watched, fast rooted where he stood The embers of another day expire In glory welling westward, like the pyre Of some spent viking whom the Atlantic flood Bears dwindling into that infinitude That great souls end in; then around the fire Of his own musings, lodering through the bars Of a shrunk life, hath sought awhile to limn His lost felicity—can ne’er divine The vastness of the common things that line Life’s banked horizon, nor hath learned to rim Infinity with galaxies of stars.