Prophecy

You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.

You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.

But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Prophecy,” Robert Penn Warren’s first published poem, was featured in The Mess Kit (Food for Thought), Vol. 1 (1922), a periodical published by the Citizens’ Military Training Camp at Fort Knox. On the concept of poetry as prophecy, Robert Penn Warren wrote in his lecture-turned-pamphlet A Plea in Mitigation: Modern Poetry and the End of an Era (1966), “When a new poetic period dawns, it always dawns with prophetic urgency; it brings with it the possibility of new experience, and is, quite simply and necessarily, a challenge of life. We are talking about the attitude toward the particular poetry that is coming in—not about what the poetry is, or professes to be.”