Meeting Ourselves
We met ourselves as we came back
As we hiked the trail from the north.
Our foot-prints mixed in the rainy path
Coming back and going forth.
The prints of my comrade’s hob-nailed shoes
And my tramp shoes mixed in the rain.
We had climbed for days and days to the North
And this was the sum of our gain:
We met ourselves as we came back,
And were happy in mist and rain.
Our old souls and our new souls
Met to salute and explain—
That a day shall be as a thousand years,
And a thousand years as a day.
The powers of a thousand dreaming skies
As we shouted along the trail of surprise
Were gathered in our play:
The purple skies of the South and the North,
The crimson skies of the South and the North,
Of tomorrow and yesterday.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 2, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Meeting Ourselves” appears in Vachel Lindsay’s poetry collection Every Soul Is a Circus (The Macmillan Company, 1929). In the book’s introduction, “Inscription for the Entrance to a Book,” Lindsay wrote: “Dear Parents: This is a book for precocious children, twelve or fifty years of age. […] Elaborate reading is what is required, reading that comes to the edge of a chant without having the literary meaning clouded by the chant. […] Setting poetry to music, even the best music, is the destruction of poetry and the production of an amorphous and confused result. All poetry that has been set to music has been blasted thereby. On the other hand, poetry carefully read and set to dancing is recreated, made social and troubadourish, raised from the dead golden treasuries into life again.”
Vachel Lindsay
