I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes
And yet I am, and livelike vapors tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strangenay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass belowabove the vaulted sky.
