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