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Poems

Chapter 52: VITA, VITA!
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About This Book

A varied collection of lyric and narrative verse that moves between short songs, sonnets, rondels, and longer meditative pieces. Many poems use pastoral and seasonal imagery to celebrate fields, harvest, and the sensory life of the natural world while also acknowledging the hardships and dignity of rural labor. Recurring themes include love, absence, memory, and spiritual longing, treated with formal variety and musical language. The tone alternates between celebratory, elegiac, and reflective, blending vivid description with moral and emotional observation.

VITA, VITA!

The flight of the years pursues me.
And nothing is done!
Nor gained, nor made, nor accomplished—
Only Youth—lost.
Slave to the pleasure that fetters, (nor would be free,)
Tired of the light before the disk of the sun
Is more than half of a circle!
Stunned at the cost
Of full free living, and nothing wherewith to pay
The long close score that blights with its fearful truth—
But my Youth.