WINTER
_We, whom God sets a task,
Striving, who ne'er attain,
We are the curst!--who ask
Death, and still ask in vain.
We, whom God sets a task._
1
_In the silence of his room. After many days._
All, all are shadows. All must pass
As writing in the sand or sea;
Reflections in a looking-glass
Are not less permanent than we.
The days that mould us--what are they?
That break us on their whirling wheel?
What but the potters! we the clay
They fashion and yet leave unreal.
Linked through the ages, one and all,
In long anthropomorphous chain,
The human and the animal
Inseparably must remain.
Within us still the monster shape
That shrieked in air and howled in slime,
What are we?--partly man and ape--
The tools of fate, the toys of time!
2
_The bitterness of his bereavement speaks in him._
Vased in her bedroom window, white
As her chaste girlhood, never lost,
I smelt the roses--and the night
Outside was fog and frost.
What though I claimed her dying there!
God nor one angel understood
Nor cared, who from sweet feet to hair
Had changed to snow her blood.
She had been mine so long, so long!
Our harp of life was one in word--
Why did death thrust his hand among
The chords and break one chord!
A placid lily was the face,
A sad pale rose the mouth I kissed
That morn, when filled with Heaven's own grace
She passed into the mist.
3
_Her dead face seems to rise up before him._
The face that I said farewell to,
Pillowed a flower on flowers,
Comes back with its eyes to tell to
My soul what its lips would spell too--
Comes back to me at hours!--
Dear, is your heart still daggered
There by something amiss?
Love--is he still a laggard?
Hope--is her face still haggard
Tell me what it is!
You, who are done with To-morrow!
Done with these worldly skies!
Done with our pain and sorrow!
Done with the griefs we borrow!
Prayers and tears and sighs!
Must we say "gone forever"?
Or will it all come true?
Shall I attain to you ever?
And, o'er the doubts that sever,
Rise to the truth that's you?
Love, in my flesh so fearful,
Medicine me this pain!--
Love, with the eyes so tearful,
How can my soul be cheerful,
Seeing its joy is slain!
Gone!--'twas only a vision!--
Gone! like a thought, a gleam!--
Such to our indecision
Utter no empty mission,
Truer than that they seem.
4
_He sinks into deep thought._
There are shadows that compel us,
There are voices that control;
More than substance these can tell us,
Speaking to the human soul.
In the moonlight, when it glistened
On my window, white as snow,
Once I woke and, leaning, listened
To a voice that sang below.
Full of gladness, full of yearning,
Strange with dreamy melody,
Like a bird whose heart is burning,
Wildly sweet it sang to me.
I arose; and by the starlight,
Pale beneath the mystic sky,
I have seen it full of far light,--
My dead joy go singing by.
In the darkness, when the glimmer
Of the storm was on the pane,
I have sat and heard a dimmer
Voice lamenting in the rain.
Full of parting and unspoken
Heartbreak, faint with agony,
Like a bird whose heart is broken,
Sadly low it cried to me.
I arose; and in the darkness
Wan beneath the haunted sky,
I have seen it, cold to starkness,--
My dead love go weeping by.
5
_He arouses from his abstraction._
So long it seems since last I saw her face,
So long ago it seems,
Like some sad soul in unconjectured space
Still seeking happiness through perished grace
And unrealities,--a little while
Illusions lead me, ending in the smile
Of Death triumphant in a thorny place
Among Love's ruined roses and dead dreams.
Since she is gone, no more I see the light,--
Since she has left all dark,--
Cleave like a revelation through the night.
I wander blindly, filled with fear and fright,
Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones
Of life, where Hope, amid the skulls and bones,
With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,
Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.
Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o'erawe,--
Now she has passed from me,--
Questions God's justice that seems full of flaw
As is His world, where misery is law,
And men but fools too willing to be slaves.--
My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,
The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,
And all is night, and I no longer see.
6
_He looks from his window toward the sombre west._
Ridged and bleak the gray forsaken
Twilight at the night has guessed;
And no star of dusk has taken
Flame unshaken in the west.
All day long the woodlands dying
Moaned, and drippings as of grief
Tossed from barren boughs with sighing
Death of flying twig and leaf.
Ah, to live a life unbroken,
Scornful of the worst of fate!
Like that tree ... with branches oaken....
Joy's unspoken intimate.--
Who can say that man has never
Lived the life of plants and trees?
Not so wide the lines that sever
Us forever here from these.
Colors, odors, that are cherished,
Haply hint we once were flowers;
Memory alone has perished
In this garished world of ours.
Music,--that all things expresses,
All for which we've loved or sinned,--
Haply in our treey tresses
Once was guesses of the wind....
But I dream!--The dusk, upbraiding,
Deepens without moon or star;
Darkness and my sorrow aiding,
We but fading phantoms are.
And within me doubt keeps saying--
"What is wrong? and what is right?
Hear the cursing! hear the praying!
All are straying on in night."
7
_He turns from the window, takes up a book and reads._
The Soul, like Earth, hath silences
Which speak not, yet are heard--
The voices mute of memories
Are louder than a word.
Theirs is a speech which is not speech;
A language that is bound
To soul-vibrations vague that reach
Deeper than any sound.
No words are theirs. They speak through things,
A visible utterance
Of thoughts--like those some sunset brings
Or withered rose perchance.
The heavens that once, in purple and flame,
Spake to two hearts as one,
In after years may speak the same
To one sad heart alone.
Through it the vanished face and eyes
Of her, the sweet and fair,
Of her the lost, again shall rise
To comfort his despair.
And so the love that led him long
From golden scene to scene,
Within the sunset is a tongue
To tell him what has been.--
How loud it speaks of that dead day,
The rose whose bloom is fled!
Of her who died; who, clasped in clay,
Lies numbered with the dead.
The dead are dead; with them 'tis well
Within their narrow room;--
No memories haunt their hearts who dwell
Within the grave and tomb.
But what of those--the dead who live!
The living dead, whose lot
Is still to love--ah, God forgive!--
To live and love, forgot!--
8
_The storm is heard sounding wildly with wind and hail._
The night is wild with rain and sleet.
Each loose-warped casement claps and groans.
I hear the plangent forest beat
The tempest with long blatant moans
As of despair, defeat.
And sitting here beyond the storm,
Alone within the lonely house,
It seems that some mesmeric charm
Hangs over all.--Why, even the mouse,
That gnawed, has come to harm.
And in the silence, stolen o'er
All things, I strangely seem to fear
Myself--that, opening yon door,
I'd find my dead self drawing near,
With face that once I wore.
The stairway creaks with ghostly gusts.
The flue moans--'tis a gorgon throat
Of wailing winds. Ancestral dusts,--
That yonder Indian war-gear coat
With gray and spectral crusts,--
Are trembled down.--Or can it be,
That he who wore it in the dance,
Or battle, now fills shadowy
Its wampumed skins? And shakes his lance
And warrior plume at me?--
Mere fancy!--Yet those curtains toss
Mysteriously as if some dark
Hand moved them.--And I'd fear to cross
The shadow there where lies that spark--
A glow-worm sunk in moss.
Outside 'twere better!--Yes, I yearn
To walk the waste where sway and dip
The dark December boughs--where burn
Some late last leaves, that drip and drip
No matter where you turn.
Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,
Fills oozy footprints--but the blind
Night there, tho' like the frown of God,
Presents no phantoms to the mind,
Like these that have o'erawed.--
The months I count: how long it seems
Since summer! summer, when with her,
There on her porch, in rainy gleams
We watched the flickering lightning stir
In heavens gray as dreams.
When all the west, a sheet of gold,
Flared,--like some Titan's opened forge,--
With storm; revealing manifold
Vast peaks of clouds with crag and gorge,
Where thunder torrents rolled.
Then came the wind; again, again
The lightning lit the world--and how
The tempest roared with rushing rain!...
We could not read.--Where is it now,
That tale of Charlemagne?
That old romance, ah me! that we
Were reading? till we heard the plunge
Of summer thunder sullenly,
And left to watch the lightning lunge,
And winds bend down each tree.--
That summer! how it built us there
A world of love and necromance!
A spirit-world, where all was fair;
An island, sleeping in a trance
Of lilied light and air.
Where every flower was a thought;
And every bird, a melody;
And every fragrance, zephyr brought,
Was but the rainbowed drapery
Of some sweet dream long sought.
O land of shadows! shadow-home,
Within my world of memories!
Around whose ruins sweeps the foam
Of sorrow's immemorial seas,
By whose dark shores I roam!
How long in your wrecked halls alone
With ghosts of joys must I remain?
Between the unknown and the known,
Still listening to the wind and rain,
And my own heart's wild moan.
9
_He sits by the slowly dying fire. The storm is heard with increased
violence._
Wild weather. The lash of the sleet
On the gusty casement tapping--
The sound of the storm like a sheet
My soul and senses wrapping.
Wild weather. And how is she,
Now the rush of the rain falls serried
Over the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried?
Wild weather. How black and deep
Is the night where the mad winds scurry!--
Do I sleep? do I dream in my sleep
That I hear her footsteps hurry?
Hither they come like flowers--
And I see her raiment glisten,
Like the robe of one of the hours
Where the stars to the angels listen.
Before me, behold, how she stands!
With lips high thoughts have weighted,
And testifying hands,
And eyes with glory sated.
I have spoken and I have kneeled;
I have kissed her feet in wonder--
But lo! her lips--they are sealed,
God-sealed, and will not sunder.
Though I sob, "Your stay was long!
You are come,--but your feet were laggard!--
With mansuetude and song
For the soul your death has daggered."
Never a word replies,
Never to all my weeping--
Only a sound of sighs,
And raiment past me sweeping....
I wake; and a clock strikes three--
And the night and the storm beat serried
Over the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried.
