Rhymes of a Rolling Stone

Prelude
I sing no idle songs of dalliance days, No dreams Elysian inspire my rhyming; I have no Celia to enchant my lays, No pipes of Pan have set my heart to chiming. I am no wordsmith dripping gems divine Into the golden chalice of a sonnet; If love songs witch you, close this book of mine, Waste no time on it. Yet bring I to my work an eager joy, A lusty love of life and all things human; Still in me leaps the wonder of the boy, A pride in man, a deathless faith in woman. Still red blood calls, still rings the valiant fray; Adventure beacons through the summer gloaming: Oh long and long and long will be the day Ere I come homing! This earth is ours to love: lute, brush and pen, They are but tongues to tell of life sincerely; The thaumaturgic Day, the might of men, O God of Scribes, grant us to grave them clearly! Grant heart that homes in heart, then all is well. Honey is honey-sweet, howe'er the hiving. Each to his work, his wage at evening bell The strength of striving.
There's sunshine in the heart of me, My blood sings in the breeze; The mountains are a part of me, I'm fellow to the trees. My golden youth I'm squandering, Sun-libertine am I; A-wandering, a-wandering, Until the day I die. I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man, And I roomed in the cool of a cave; I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span, The fret and the sweat of a slave: For far over all that folks hold worth, There lives and there leaps in me A love of the lowly things of earth, And a passion to be free. To pitch my tent with no prosy plan, To range and to change at will; To mock at the mastership of man, To seek Adventure's thrill. Carefree to be, as a bird that sings; To go my own sweet way; To reck not at all what may befall, But to live and to love each day. To make my body a temple pure Wherein I dwell serene; To care for the things that shall endure, The simple, sweet and clean. To oust out envy and hate and rage, To breathe with no alarm; For Nature shall be my anchorage, And none shall do me harm. To shun all lures that debauch the soul, The orgied rites of the rich; To eat my crust as a rover must With the rough-neck down in the ditch. To trudge by his side whate'er betide; To share his fire at night; To call him friend to the long trail-end, And to read his heart aright. To scorn all strife, and to view all life With the curious eyes of a child; From the plangent sea to the prairie, From the slum to the heart of the Wild. From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand, From the vast to the greatly small; For I know that the whole for good is planned, And I want to see it all. To see it all, the wide world-way, From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole; With never a one to say me nay, And none to cramp my soul. In belly-pinch I will pay the price, But God! let me be free; For once I know in the long ago, They made a slave of me. In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt, Here, pal, is my calloused hand! Oh, I love each day as a rover may, Nor seek to understand. To ENJOY is good enough for me; The gipsy of God am I; Then here's a hail to each flaring dawn! And here's a cheer to the night that's gone! And may I go a-roaming on Until the day I die! Then every star shall sing to me Its song of liberty; And every morn shall bring to me Its mandate to be free. In every throbbing vein of me I'll feel the vast Earth-call; O body, heart and brain of me Praise Him who made it all!