This boy, this youth, this honey in the blood, This kingly danger, this immediate fire. I know what comes of it and how it lies And how, long afterwards, at the split core Of the prodigious and self-eaten lie, A little grain of truth lies undissolved By all the acids of philosophy. Therefore, I will not seek a remedy Against a sword but in the sword itself Nor medicine life with anything but life. I am too old to try the peddler’s tricks, Too wise, too foolish, too long strayed in the wood, The custom of the world is not my custom, Nor its employments mine. I know this girl As well as if I never lay with her mother. I know her heart touched with that wilderness-stone That turns good money into heaps of leaves And builds an outcast house of apple-twigs Beside a stream that never had a name. She will forget what I cannot forget, And she may learn what I shall never learn, But, while the wilderness-stone is strong in her, I’d have her use it for a touchstone yet