Be sure my coming was a sharp offense
And trouble to my mother in her bed;
And harsh to me must be my going hence,
Though I were old and spent and better dead;
Between the awful spears of birth and death
I run a grassy gauntlet in the sun;
And curdled in me is my central pith,
Remembering there is dying to be done.
 
O life, my little day, at what cost
Have you been purchased! What a bargain's here!
(And yet, thou canny Lender, thou hast lost:
Thumb thy fat book until my debt appear:
So . . . art thou stuck? . . . thou canst not strike that through
For the small dying that a man can do!)