"Not yet. Not yet," between the lines

I read in urgent shifting signs.

I could not, must not, go to bed

Until I knew what the whole book said.

Here is a hundred-year-old day

In words forever wearing away,

Tall with ships, and loud with men,

And over the page the guns again,

And over the page again the words

Locked in onward flight like birds."

Troy was falling, in blood and dust.

Confederate swords were dark with rust.

An English ship at noon went down.

A big shell burst in a country town.

I was a child who turned the page

With a reader's right and hungry rage

To take the meaning and make it his.

There in the book it was, and is,

For always, reading, I looked away

At things the book could never say.

The green lamp shone in evening air.

All that I knew of good was there.

Bedtime came, and the end of the book,

But out to the dark of sleep I took

The dreams that fade, but never cease,

The words of war in the house of peace.