FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
by: William Dean Howells
(1837-1920)
- NNOCENT
spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts!
- Why throng your heavenly hosts,
- As eager for their birth
- In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth?
-
- Beware! Beware! Content you where you are,
- And shun this evil star
- Where we who are doomed to die,
- Have our brief being and pass, we know not where or why.
-
- We have not to consent or to refuse;
- It is not ours to choose:
- We come because we must,
- We know not by what law, if unjust or if just.
-
- The doom is on us, as it is on you,
- That nothing can undo;
- And all in vain you warn:
- As your fate is to die, our fate is to be born.
"From Generation to Generation"
is reprinted from Harper's Magazine, Volume 86, Issue
514 (March, 1893). |
MORE POEMS BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS |
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