Renascence and Other Poems | Page 6

sleep, and wake to find me back
In
that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? 'Tis summer still by
the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the
world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I
had not thought
That I could move, -- and you be stiff and still!

That I could speak, -- and you perforce be dumb!
I think our
heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in
and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller
fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the 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!
0. 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