They've offered you a queer year's job overseas.

Take it, and say goodbye to no one. Go -

To Cairo, go to Paris, to high western China.

Round the world in a year, how do you know?

Where new centuries are beginning, the old

Nations falling, wherever there is change,

Go there - Russia, Palestine, Poland, Greece.

Where you fly of course but the food is strange,

Where there's a good chance of losing everything,

And all you do is crazy and quite dangerous,

And why you stay on you're damned if you know.

Go there. But before you are twenty six or seven.

If they offer you more money here, a big title,

Take it and oh tear it apart as fast as possible.

Remember all you can do now is so very little.

Read, everything, do your greedy reading young.

Be young when you hear the great music first.

Try your hand. Will it work wood? Send your eye

To color, to wander on the wiry coast

Of the shape of things man has moved and made.

Try your words. No one has turned English yet

For the last time, or heard it as you hear.

Be traveling from the last idea you met.

Learn all there is to know about meat and drink,

The quick, the mild, the old, and never say no.

Sit up all night with hedonists and printers,

Parsons, musicians, people who never know when to go.

Since you asked, I'll say your answer must be yes

To trouble and geography and time. Say yes.

Usually this poem stops here. You wake at forty

One morning that offers you forty years more,

Not sitting up all night in China, not dangerous,

But going out coming in sanely the same door

To where new countries are being made, the old

Nations falling in the mind, and always change.

Climb the cliffs of your heart, taste now time.

You are there, the words and the food not strange,

You hadn't thought it would-be so a second trip.

It is. The distances are longer. But you go

From deserts into green gold incredible fields

With a map, past landmarks you seem to know.

Not seem to know, but know and know again .

All you used and lost and read and loved, all

Tell you the real world is endlessly within.

Now only now can you begin to make it whole.