The long delight and early
I heard in my small years clearly:
The morning song, bed-making, bustle for new undertaking,
With dish-washing and hay-raking,
This vanished, or seemed diminished,
Was lost, in trouble finished.
I did nervous work, unsteady, captive work and heady.
Nothing well-done and ready.
And heard in other places
Than home, and from foreign faces
The dauntless gay and breezy communal song of the busy,
I-idle and uneasy.
I said, my work is silly,
Lonely and willy-nilly.
See this hand with nicotined habits, this useless hand that edits
A chronicle of debits.
Join, if I can, the makers,
And the tillers of difficult acres;
And get somehow this dearly lost, this re-discovered rarely
Habit of rising early.
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