  We are the pensioners of Spring, And take the largess of her hand When vassal warder winds unbar The wintry portals of her land; The lonely shadow-girdled winds, Her seraph almoners, who keep This little life in flesh and bone With meagre portions of white sleep. We go on some fool's idle quest, And eat her bread and wine in thrall To a fool's shame with blind unrest. Until her April train goes by, And then because we are the kin Of every hill flower on the hill We must arise and walk therein. Because her heart as our own heart, Knowing the same wild upward stir, Beats joyward by eternal laws, We must arise and go with her; Return when dawns and dreams retire; Make grief a phantom of regret, And fate the henchman of desire; Divorce unreason from delight; Learn how despair is uncontrol, Failure the shadow of remorse, And death a shudder of the soul. Yea, must we triumph when she leads. A little rain before the sun, A breath of wind on the road's dust, The sound of trammeled brooks undone, The year's white prime, on bank and stream The haunting cadence of no song And vivid wanderings of dream, A range of low blue hills, the far First whitethroat's ecstasy unfurled: And we are overlords of change, In the glad morning of the world, Though we should fare as they whose life Time takes within his hands to wring Between the winter and the sea, The weary pensioners of Spring.
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