On Growing Old

• Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying; 
• My dog and I are old, too old for roving. 
• Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, 
• Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. 
• I take the book and gather to the fire, 
• Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute 
• The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire, 
• Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet. 
• I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander 
• Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys 
• Ever again, nor share the battle yonder 
• Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies. 
• Only stay quiet while my mind remembers 
• The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers. 

• Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power, 
• The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace, 
• Summer of man its sunlight and its flower. 
• Spring-time of man, all April in a face. 
• Only, as in the jostling in the Strand, 
• Where the mob thrusts, or loiters, or is loud, 
• The beggar with the saucer in his hand 
• Asks only a penny from the passing crowd, 
• So, from this glittering world with all its fashion, 
• Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march, 
• Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion, 
• Bread to the soul, rain when the summers parch. 
• Give me but these, and though the darkness close 
• Even the night will blossom as the rose.

British poet John Edward Masefield was born in 1878 and at the age of 13, because of his ambition to become a merchant seaman, entered the training ship Conway. After two and a half years on the school ship he was apprenticed aboard a sailing ship that was bound for Chile. In 1895, he deserted his ship in New York City and worked there in a carpet factory and as an assistant barkeeper and dishwasher in a New York City saloon. When Masefield returned to London a few years later he became a full-time writer.

His first volume of poems, Salt-Water Ballads, established his reputation as an exceptional poet. In 1903 he married Constance de la Cherois-Crommelin and they had two children. During World War I, Masefield served in the Red Cross in France and on a hospital ship at Gallipoli. In 1930, he was appointed British Poet Laureate, a position that he maintained until his death in 1967. Except for Tennyson, he was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in British history. To hear the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald reading the first stanza of this poem, go to www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/24/f-scott-fitzgerald-reads-john.