I WAS shipmate with Sorrow in a day gone by;
We shared wheel and look-out, old Sorrow and I;
Good times and bad times, foul weather and fair,
The old grey face of him was always there.
There was never chanty raised there, never song I heard.
But his voice would be in it like a crying bird ;
I was dull in the dog watches, when the laugh went free.
Because of old Sorrow sitting down by me.
I thought I could lose him in the stir and change
Of bright, wicked cities, all sunlit and strange ;
There came a hand at my elbow and a voice in my ear —
It was old patient Sorrow saying: "Lad, I'm here!"
And by the bustling harbour, up the busy street.
Many a time I see him, many a time I meet
Chilled into a serenity
As rigid as your pose
You linger trustingly,
But a gutter waits for you.
Your elegance does not secure
You favors with the sun.
He is not one to pity fragileness.
He thinks all cheeks should burn
And feel how tears can run.
A village wrapped in slumber,
Silent between the hills,
Empty of moon-lit marketplace,
Empty of moving life--
Such is my quiet heart.
Shadowy-walled it rests,
Sleeping its heavy sleep;
But sudden across the dark
Tingles a sound of drums!
The drums, the drums, the distant drums,
The throb of the drums strikes up,
The beat of the drums awakes!
Then loud through the little streets,
And strange to the startled roofs,
The drums, the drums approach and pound,
And throb and clamour and thrill and pass,
Letters from Home, you said.
Unopened they lay on the shack-sill
As you stared with me at the prairie
And the foothills bathed with light.
Letters from Home, you whispered,
And the homeland casements shone
Through the homeland dusk again,
And the sound of the birds came back,
And the soft green sorrowing hills,
And the sigh of remembered names,
The wine of remembered youth,--
Oh, these came back,
Back with those idle words
Of "Letters from Home"!
Over such desolate leagues,
Over such sundering seas,
I lay by your side last night.
By you, in my dreams,
I felt the damp of the grave.
I was dead with you--
And my bones still ache with Death.
For my hand went out and I touched your lips,
And I found them fallen away,
Wasted and lost!
Those lips once warm with life
Were eaten and gone!
And my soul screamed out in the dark
At the intimate blackness of Death.
And then I arose from the dead
And returned to the day;
And my bones and my heart still ache with it all,
And I hunger to hear the relieving babble of life,
My heart stood empty and bare,
So I hung it with thoughts of a woman.
The remembered ways of this woman
Hung sweet in my heart.
So I followed where thought should lead,
And it led to her feet.
But the mouth of this woman was pain,
And the love of this woman, regret;
And now only the thought
Of all those remembered thoughts
Of remembered ways,
Is shut in my heart!
The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;
In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard
A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.
Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,
And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.
There are no birds,
And the goldenrod is gone.
And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;
And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper,
And all the world seems old!
Dewy, dewy lawn-slopes,
Is this the day she comes?
O wild-flower face of Morning,
Must you never wake?
Silvery, silvery sea-line,
Does she come to-day?
O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,
Beneath your whispering shadow
She will surely pass;
And thrush beneath the black-thorn
And white-throat in the pine-top,
Sing as you have never sung,
For she will surely come!
The lone green of the lawn-slope,
The grey light on the sky-line,
The mournful stir of birch-leaves,
"The sting of it all," you said, as you stooped low over your roses,
"The worst of it is, when I think of Death,
That Spring by Spring the Earth shall still be beautiful,
And Summer by Summer be lovely again,
--And I shall be gone!"
"I would not care, perhaps," you said, watching your roses,
"If only 'twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!
But the thought that Earth and April
Year by casual year
Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,
Year by year when I am away,
--This, this breaks my heart!"
You bid me to sleep,--
But why, O Daughter of Beauty,
Was beauty thus born in the world?
Since out of these shadowy eyes
The wonder shall pass!
And out of this surging and passionate breast
The dream shall depart!
And out of these delicate rivers of warmth
The fire shall wither and fail!
And youth like a bird from your body shall fly!
And Time like a fang on your flesh shall feed!
And this perilous bosom that pulses with love
Shall go down to the dust from which it arose,--
Yet Daughter of Beauty, close,
Close to its sumptuous warmth
You hold my sorrowing head,
A rind of light hangs low
On the rim of the world;
A sound of feet disturbs
The quiet of the cell
Where a rope and a beam looms high
At the end of the yard.
But in the dusk
Of that walled yard waits a woman;
And as the thing from its cell,
Still guarded and chained and bound,
Crosses that little space,
Silent, for ten brief steps,
A woman hangs on his neck.
And that walk from a cell to a sleep
Is known as Life,
And those ten dark steps
Listen!
Footsteps
Are they,
That falter through the gloom,
That echo through the lonely chambers
Of our house of life?
Listen!
Did a door close?
Did a whisper waken?
Did a ghostly something
Sigh across the dusk?
From the mournful silence
Something, something went!
Far down some shadowy passage
Faintly closed a door--
And O how empty lies