A New Pilgrimage: Sonnet XXVI

Youth is all valiant. He and I together,
Conscious of strength, and unreproved of wrong,
Strained at the world's conventions as a tether
Too weak to bind us, and burst forth in song.
The backs of fools we scourged as with a thong,
And falsehood stripped to its last borrowed feather,
And vowed to fact what things to fact belong,
And of the rest asked neither why nor whether.
Gravely we triumphed in that Gorgon time,
Unsexed for us at length thro' lack of faith,
Our barren mistress, from whose womb sublime
No beauty more should spring, but only death.
Like birds we sang by some volcanic brink,
Leaning on ugliness, and did not shrink.