Renascence and Other Poems | Page 6

exquisite?Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart?Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled?In the damp earth with you. I have been torn?In two, and suffer for the rest of me.?What is my life to me? And what am I?To life, -- a ship whose star has guttered out??A Fear that in the deep night starts awake?Perpetually, to find its senses strained?Against the taut strings of the quivering air,?Awaiting the return of some dread chord?
Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;?All else were contrast, -- save that contrast's wall?Is down, and all opposed things flow together?Into a vast monotony, where night?And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,?Are synonyms. What now -- what now to me?Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers?That clutter up the world? You were my song!?Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!?Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not?Plant things above your grave -- (the common balm?Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)?Amid sensations rendered negative?By your elimination stands to-day,?Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;?I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth?With travesties of suffering, nor seek?To effigy its incorporeal bulk?In little wry-faced images of woe.
I cannot call you back; and I desire?No utterance of my immaterial voice.?I cannot even turn my face this way?Or that, and say, "My face is turned to you";?I know not where you are, I do not know?If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,?Body and soul, you into earth again;?But this I know: -- not for one second's space?Shall I insult my sight with visionings?Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed?Beholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.?Let the world wail! Let drip its easy tears!?My sorrow shall be dumb!
? What do I say? God! God! -- God pity me! Am I gone mad That I should spit upon a rosary? Am I become so shrunken? Would to God I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch Makes temporal the most enduring grief; Though it must walk a while, as is its wont, With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is That keeps the world alive. If all at once Faith were to slacken, -- that unconscious faith Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone Of all believing, -- birds now flying fearless Across would drop in terror to the earth; Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins Would tangle in the frantic hands of God And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!
O God, I see it now, and my sick brain?Staggers and swoons! How often over me?Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight?In which I see the universe unrolled?Before me like a scroll and read thereon?Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl?Dizzily round and round and round and round,?Like tops across a table, gathering speed?With every spin, to waver on the edge?One instant -- looking over -- and the next?To shudder and lurch forward out of sight --

Ah, I am worn out -- I am wearied out --?It is too much -- I am but flesh and blood,?And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,?I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.
The Suicide
"Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!?Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!?And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,?I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly?That I might eat again, and met thy sneers?With deprecations, and thy blows with tears, --?Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,?As if spent passion were a holiday!?And now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow?Of tardy kindness can avail thee now?With me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;?Lonely I came, and I depart alone,?And know not where nor unto whom I go;?But that thou canst not follow me I know."
Thus I to Life, and ceased; but through my brain?My thought ran still, until I spake again:
"Ah, but I go not as I came, -- no trace?Is mine to bear away of that old grace?I brought! I have been heated in thy fires,?Bent by thy hands, fashioned to thy desires,?Thy mark is on me! I am not the same?Nor ever more shall be, as when I came.?Ashes am I of all that once I seemed.?In me all's sunk that leapt, and all that dreamed?Is wakeful for alarm, -- oh, shame to thee,?For the ill change that thou hast wrought in me,?Who laugh no more nor lift my throat to sing!?Ah, Life, I would have been a pleasant thing?To have about the house when I was grown?If thou hadst left my little joys alone!?I asked of thee no favor save this one:?That thou wouldst leave me playing in the