Let me not see your grief!
O, let not any see
That grief,
Nor how your heart still rocks
Like a temple with long earthquake shocks.
Let me not see
Your grief.
These eyes have seen such wrong,
Yet remained cold:
Ills grown strong,
Corruption's many-headed worm
Destroying feet that moved so firm--
Shall these eyes see
Your grief?
And that black worm has crawled
Into the brain
Why, mourner, do you mourn, nor see
The heavenly Earth's felicity?
I mourn for him, my Dearest, lost,
Who lived a frail life at my cost.
A grief like yours how many have known!
Were that a balm to ease my own!
Or rather might I not accuse
The Hand that does not even choose,
But, taking blindly, took my best,
And as indifferently takes the rest ...
Like mine? Is there denied to me
Even Sorrow's singularity?
She wears, my beloved, a rose upon her head.
Walk softly angels, lest your gentle tread
Awake her to the turmoil and the strife,
The dissonance and hates called life.
She sleeps, my beloved, a rose upon her head.
Who says she will not hear, that she is dead?
The rose will fade and lose its lovely hue,
But not, my beloved, will fading wither you.
If this is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
Then better far the hateful fret, the sting.
Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!
Is this pain's surcease? Better far the ache,
The long-drawn dreary day, the night's white wake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath
Than passion's death!
My heart that was so passionless
Leapt high last night when I saw you!
Within me surged the grief of years
And whelmed me with its endless rue.
My heart that slept so still, so spent,
Awoke last night,--to break anew!
I WILL not dance :
I say I will not dance.
Your audience, pah, let them go home again,
Sleek, ugly pigs. Am I to hop and prance
As long as they will pay,
And posture for their eyes, and lay
My womanhood before them ? Let them drain
Their porter pots and snuffle — I'll not stay.
For he is dead :
I tell you he is dead.
My God, did you not hear me say it
Twice already ? I held his groaning head
In these remembering arms,
And cursed the charms
That could not stop his going. Must I bay it
Like a dog to you ? Quit your alarms !
O love, you have shorn me, and rifled my heart,
You have torn down the shrine from the innermost part.
And through it now rushes a grief, sadly-wild,
That breaks as the plaint of a sorrowing child.
I called you through the silent night
Across the brooding deep,
I sought you in the shadowland
From out the world — asleep;
No answer echoed to my call,
And now my way I thread
About the lowly mounds that rise
Among the silent dead.
Though voiceless, you will hear my call,
Your soul will heed my cry.
Will rise, and mock the prison where
Your bones recumbent lie.
Other hearts have broken gracefully, for your sake,
And now your eyes reproach me that my ache
Is awkward, and my arms
Are angular across my breast
Where emptiness is pressed.
Over you, over you, over,
I hang like a wave, like a lover,
Like a scimitar edged with hate ;
Too heavy with grief to be straight
And far,
Too frail to ever discover
How to fall like a wave or a lover —
Or a blue-thin scimitar.
The stone falls, the bird flies, the arrow goes home,
But we have no motion, we scatter like foam.
O, give me a song to sing for your sorrow,
A song that will lift, like a wave from the reef,
You and myself, that will fling like an arrow
My poor scattered words to the target of grief:
I want to forget, to remember no morrow,
To go with the petrel, to go with the leaf. . . .
We would fly with all things to the goal of their flying,
We would turn with all things to the magnetic star,
But we never can live, because of our dying,
And we never can be, for the things that we are.
We alone of all creatures — the stones more than we —
Have no end, no motion, no destiny.
I came
In the blinding sweep
Of ecstatic pain,
I go
In the throbbing pulse
Of aching space--
In the eons between
I piled upon you
Pain on pain
Ache on ache
And yet as I go
I shall know
That you will grieve
And want me back....