little time we live
learn painfully to practice
for eternity

The oaks, how subtle and marine!
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.

So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light;
The grassed, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.

Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.

Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour;
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.

The storm of noon above us rolled,
Of light the fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Unrocked is dark, unrippling, still.

Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descended, whispered grain by grain,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.

All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage is rage of stone;
If hopeless hope, fearless is fear,
And history is thus undone.

(Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
All windows; once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping fled.)

The caged hearts make iron stroke,
I do not love you now the less,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke

So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for Eternity.

Bearded Oaks by Robert Penn Warren as published in The collected poems of Robert Penn Warren by Robert Penn Warren (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1998).

The oaks, how subtle and marine!

Bearded, and all the layered light

Above them swims; and thus the scene,

Recessed, awaits the positive night.

The south is different.

It has a lot less snow.

It has a lot less cold.

It has a lot more sun.

It has lot more good smells.

It had lot more bad smells.

And it has live oaks.

Ages to our construction went,

Dim architecture, hour by hour;

And violence, forgot now, lent

The present stillness all its power.

Here before we were born.

Here after we will die.

The present stillness all its power.

So little time we live in Time,

And we learn all so painfully,

That we may spare this hour’s term

To practice for Eternity.

According to Wikipedia, Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic and professor at Yale University. He was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King’s Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Yale awarded Warren an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in 1973.