The sudden knowledge that you are not there,
That I live on alone,
Seems still too vast and desolate to bear,
My dear, my own.
The merciful slow years, that rend and rob,
But yet restore again,
Are shattered suddenly by one great throb
Of the old pain.
For grief that suddenly resurfaces with one great throb of old pain
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,--so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
Captures the lie that time heals and grief’s grip on every place
The green has come to the leafless tree,
The earth brings forth its grain ;
The rose has come for the honey bee :
You will not come again.
The birds have come to the empty nest,
All winter full of rain ;
Music has come where the silence was :
You will not come again.
Love swift will come for the weak lambs' cry ;
Ah for my heart's dull pain !
Lone in the cycle of change am I :
You will not come again.
Nature renews each spring while your absence stays final and lone
Since I lost you I am silence-haunted,
Sounds wave their little wings
A moment, then in weariness settle
On the flood that soundless swings.
Whether the people in the street
Like pattering ripples go by,
Or whether the theatre sighs and sighs
With a loud, hoarse sigh:
Or the wind shakes a ravel of light
Over the dead-black river,
Or night's last echoing
Makes the daybreak shiver:
I feel the silence waiting
To take them all up again
In its vast completeness, enfolding
The sound of men.
Every sound is swallowed by a silence that loss has left behind
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed--a lovely one--
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
Speaks to the isolation when someone you love is emotionally gone
Now I knew I lost her --
Not that she was gone --
But Remoteness travelled
On her Face and Tongue.
Alien, though adjoining
As a Foreign Race --
Traversed she though pausing
Latitudeless Place.
Elements Unaltered --
Universe the same
But Love's transmigration --
Somehow this had come --
Henceforth to remember
Nature took the Day
I had paid so much for --
His is Penury
Captures the ache of a loss that lingers not in absence but in the emotional distance of someone still present
How stern are the woes of the desolate mourner,
As he bends in still grief o'er the hallowed bier,
As enanguished he turns from the laugh of the scorner,
And drops, to Perfection's remembrance, a tear;
When floods of despair down his pale cheek are streaming,
When no blissful hope on his bosom is beaming,
Or, if lulled for awhile, soon he starts from his dreaming,
And finds torn the soft ties to affection so dear.
Ah! when shall day dawn on the night of the grave,
Or summer succeed to the winter of death?
Rest awhile, hapless victim, and Heaven will save
The spirit, that faded away with the breath.
Eternity points in its amaranth bower,
Where no clouds of fate o'er the sweet prospect lower,
Mourning's heavy weight is voiced, yet a sliver of hope for release appears when despair seems endless
THOU ling’ring star, with lessening ray,
That lov’st to greet the early morn,
Again thou usher’st in the day
My Mary from my soul was torn.
O Mary! dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?
That sacred hour can I forget,
Can I forget the hallow’d grove,
Where, by the winding Ayr, we met,
To live one day of parting love!
Eternity will not efface
Those records dear of transports past,
Thy image at our last embrace,
Ah! little thought we ’twas our last!
Grief stays raw as time passes; the speaker's pain is unrelenting, mirrored by nature's cycles
I got so I could take his name --
Without -- Tremendous gain --
That Stop-sensation -- on my Soul --
And Thunder -- in the Room --
I got so I could walk across
That Angle in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned -- how --
And all our Sinew tore --
I got so I could stir the Box --
In which his letters grew
Without that forcing, in my breath --
As Staples -- driven through --
Could dimly recollect a Grace --
I think, they call it "God" --
Renowned to ease Extremity --
When Formula, had failed --
Shows how grief numbs the soul over time, and even divine comfort feels distant before such vast misery
I walked upon a hill
And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence,
Reeled against me.
I stooped to question a flower,
And you floated between my fingers and the petals,
Tying them together.
I severed a leaf from its tree
And a water-drop in the green flagon
Cupped a hunted bit of your smile.
All things about me were steeped in your remembrance
And shivering as they tried to tell me of it.
The lost one's presence haunts every natural thing, making the world itself a vessel of unending sorrow
I shall not be afraid any more.
Either by night or day ;
What would it profit me to be afraid
With you away?
Now I am brave. In the dark night alone
All through the house I go,
Locking the doors and making windows fast
When sharp winds blow.
For there is only sorrow in my heart ;
There is no room for fear.
But how I wish I were afraid again,
My dear, my dear!
Turns grief inside out: the loss is so total that even fear is gone, and you begin to miss it
When a storm comes up at night and the wind is crying,
When the trees are moaning like masts on laboring ships,
I wake in fear and put out my hand to find you
With your name on my lips.
No pain that the heart can hold is like to this one —
To call, forgetting, into aching space,
To reach out confident hands and find beside you
Only an empty place.
This should atone for the hours when I forget you.
Take then my offering, clean and sharp and sweet,
An agony brighter than years of dull remembrance.
I lay it at your feet.
That reflexive midnight reach for someone who isn't there — the sharpest stab of grief
This Chasm, Sweet, upon my life
I mention it to you,
When Sunrise through a fissure drop
The Day must follow too.
If we demur, its gaping sides
Disclose as 'twere a Tomb
Ourself am lying straight wherein
The Favorite of Doom.
When it has just contained a Life
Then, Darling, it will close
And yet so bolder every Day
So turbulent it grows
I'm tempted half to stitch it up
With a remaining Breath
I should not miss in yielding, though
To Him, it would be Death --
Feels grief as a living chasm you haul around daily, a tomb you breathe inside
So give me back to Death --
The Death I never feared
Except that it deprived of thee --
And now, by Life deprived,
In my own Grave I breathe
And estimate its size --
Its size is all that Hell can guess --
And all that Heaven was --
Life without them becomes a self-made grave, and Death starts to look like reunion
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp'd no more--
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
The unrelenting morning after loss — the empty street, the blank day, the hand you can't hold
A wind rose in the night,
(She had always feared it so!)
Sorrow plucked at my heart
And I could not help but go.
Softly I went and stood
By her door at the end of the hall.
Dazed with grief I watched
The candles flaring and tall.
The wind was wailing aloud:
I thought how she would have cried
For my warm familiar arms
And the sense of me by her side.
The candles flickered and leapt,
The shadows jumped on the wall.
She lay before me small and still
And did not care at all.
The image of the wind and the dead one's stillness speaks to grief that cannot be undone by any comfort
While all of you are bringing milk and bread
And stroking me and saying I must rest,
Remembrance beats like black wings in my head,
And wolfish grief is clawing in my breast.
I know that you are kind, that you mean well,
And thanking you so quietly I seem
So comforted that you could never tell
I'm wondering why it is I do not scream.
Oh crucify me! Nail my hands and feet!
Strike in and turn the torture of a knife
Heart-deep to loose my blood and take my breath
Pain would be good and suffering seem sweet.
But keep your love for those who still love life.
And do not feed me who am starved to death.
The rejection of kindness and longing for physical pain mirrors grief that refuses to lift
Heap slumber on your eyes;
Stop your mouth with dust
Be all that you were not,
As dead folk must.
Be all that you were not,
Unmindful, cold, apart—
The kiss you gave that dusk
Tears at your heart!
Memory of a kiss becomes an agony that tears at the heart, echoing loss that persists
When you had been dead a week
I entered a shining shop,
And there in a neat pink row
Lay little dolls made of soap.
And I thought, "I will take one home.
How she will laugh to see it !
How it will bob in her bath
And slip through her dripping fingers !"
Only a moment I smiled.
Only a moment I dreamed it.
Then my heart stood still with pain
And I went out into the darkness.
The sudden collapse of a happy thought into heart-stopping pain captures grief's relentless return
My head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,--or haply, if I sought, to find;
It came unsought);--to wonder that a chief
Among men's spirits should be cold and blind.
Weeping that finds no relief and the coldness of a once-brilliant spirit convey unyielding sorrow
Oh, for a world empty of you,
Quite bare of anything.
With any likeness to the old.
For wild remembering!
A world so wholly different,
I would be different too.
And read, or mend, or plant the bulbs,
Without a thought of you.
But this can never be at all;
Some small thing thereabout
Would bring that same hurt back again,
And tear my wild heart out.
Perhaps the smell of yarrow flowers,
Of yarrow flowers set
In a lost field. White: yarrow flowers.
Out in the August wet.
Memory burrows into small sights and smells, so grief keeps tearing you open
When the green lies over the earth, my dear,
A mantle of witching grace,
When the smile and the tear of the young child year
Dimple across its face,
And then flee, when the wind all day is sweet
With the breath of growing things,
When the wooing bird lights on restless feet
And chirrups and trills and sings
To his lady-love
In the green above,
Then oh! my dear, when the youth’s in the year,
Yours is the face that I long to have near,
Yours is the face, my dear.
But the green is hiding your curls, my dear,
Your curls so shining and sweet;
And the gold-hearted daisies this many a year
Even spring's renewal can't ease the ache for a face gone missing
Since I noo mwore do zee your feace,
Up steairs or down below,
I’ll zit me in the lwonesome pleace,
Where flat-bough’d beech do grow;
Below the beeches’ bough, my love,
Where you did never come,
An’ I don’t look to meet ye now,
As I do look at hwome.
Since you noo mwore be at my zide,
In walks in zummer het,
I’ll goo alwone where mist do ride,
Drough trees a-drippen wet;
Below the rain-wet bough, my love,
Where you did never come,
An’ I don’t grieve to miss ye now,
As I do grieve at hwome.
Finding a quiet place where the loss feels less sharp, with hope of reunion
The road is left; the yard;
And the old sycamore;
Larkspurs tall in the grass
Just at the door;
And the thick gusty wind that breaks
The clothes-props down;
She has a bed to make; for her tall girl
A buff-sprigged gown.
But oh, to have him back again
Flashing and young;
To sit in yonder chair,
And with delicate tongue
To talk to her of love,
And things that last —
Go call him from his grave
Where he lies fast!
Daily chores keep circling back to the vivid ache of the one who's gone
Last night I heard your voice, mother,
The words you sang to me
When I, a little barefoot boy,
Knelt down against your knee.
And tears gushed from my heart, mother,
And passed beyond its wall,
But though the fountain reached my throat
The drops refused to fall.
’Tis ten years since you died, mother,
Just ten dark years of pain,
And oh, I only wish that I
Could weep just once again.
Frozen tears that won't fall even after ten years of grief
I WEEP for happy-sweet days
When your love was near me
Strong in its magical ways,
To hold and cheer me!
To my sad broken life,
Your love had given,
For endless, hopeless strife,
Peace of high Heaven.
I thought your charmed cure
Could have no ending.
And shall no spell endure
Of your dear befriending?
As a dead miser yearns
For earth-stored treasure,
So fiercely my soul burns
For old sweet pleasure
Regret and yearning for a love that used to lift sorrow, now only sharpens it
When the dark comes,
" Is this the end ? " I pray ;
No answer from the night,
And then once more the day.
I take the world again
Upon my neck and go
Pace with the serious hours.
Since fate will have it so,
Begone, dead man, unclasp
Your hands from round my heart,
I and my burden pass.
You and your peace depart.
Carrying grief as a daily burden while the dead still cling to your heart
The sun immense and rosy
Must have sunk and become extinct
The night you closed your eyes for ever against me.
Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings
Since then, with fritter of flowers--
Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings.
Still, you left me the nights,
The great dark glittery window,
The bubble hemming this empty existence with lights.
Still in the vast hollow
Like a breath in a bubble spinning
Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the bounds like a swallow!
I can look through
The film of the bubble night, to where you are.
Through the film I can almost touch you.
Nights become a translucent barrier where the lost one feels almost touchable
If I could have put you in my heart,
If but I could have wrapped you in myself,
How glad I should have been!
And now the chart
Of memory unrolls again to me
The course of our journey here, before we had to
part.
And oh, that you had never, never been
Some of your selves, my love, that some
Of your several faces I had never seen!
And still they come before me, and they go,
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.
And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night,
And have not any longer any hope
To heal the suffering, or make requite
For all your life of asking and despair,
Remorse over love never fully held leaves part of you dead with them
They die--the dead return not--Misery
Sits near an open grave and calls them over,
A Youth with hoary hair and haggard eye--
They are the names of kindred, friend and lover,
Which he so feebly calls--they all are gone--
Fond wretch, all dead! those vacant names alone,
This most familiar scene, my pain--
These tombs--alone remain.
Misery, my sweetest friend--oh, weep no more!
Thou wilt not be consoled--I wonder not!
For I have seen thee from thy dwelling's door
Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot
Was even as bright and calm, but transitory,
And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary;
This most familiar scene, my pain--
These tombs--alone remain.
Misery sits at the grave calling names that never answer back
Let them bury your big eyes
In the secret earth securely,
Your thin fingers, and your fair,
Soft, indefinite-colored hair,--
All of these in some way, surely,
From the secret earth shall rise;
Not for these I sit and stare,
Broken and bereft completely;
Your young flesh that sat so neatly
On your little bones will sweetly
Blossom in the air.
But your voice,--never the rushing
Of a river underground,
Not the rising of the wind
In the trees before the rain,
Not the woodcock's watery call,
Mourns the irreplaceable loss of a voice—grief that no natural cycle can heal
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.
Grief as wild devastation that tears down the heart's shrine and leaves childlike sorrow
Weak is the sophistry, and vain the art
That whispers patience to the mind's despair!
That bids reflection bathe the wounds of care,
While Hope, with pleasing phantoms, soothes their smart.
For mem'ry still, reluctant to depart
From the dear spot, once rich in prospects fair,
Bids the fond soul enamour'd there,
And its least charm is grateful to the heart!
He never lov'd, who could not muse and sigh,
Spangling the sacred turf with frequent tears,
Where the small rivulet, that ripples by,
Recalls the scenes of past and happier years,
When, on its banks he watch'd the speaking eye,
And one sweet smile o'erpaid an age of fears!
Shows how memory keeps grief alive, overpowering reason and flooding the heart with tears
It is not the tear at this moment shed,
When the cold turf has just been laid o'er him,
That can tell how beloved was the friend that's fled,
Or how deep in our hearts we deplore him.
'Tis the tear, through many a long day wept,
'Tis life's whole path o'ershaded;
'Tis the one remembrance, fondly kept,
When all lighter griefs have faded.
Thus his memory, like some holy light,
Kept alive in our hearts, will improve them,
For worth shall look fairer, and truth more bright,
When we think how he lived but to love them.
And as fresher flowers the sod perfume
Where buried saints are lying,
So our hearts shall borrow a sweetening bloom
From the image he left there in dying!
Grief that won't lift becomes a lasting, holy remembrance that changes how you live
for my father, 1922-1944
Your face did not rot
like the others--the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him
yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare
as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot
like the others--it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their
distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive
Paralyzing, lifelong grief for a lost father who remains a distant, untouchable presence
Death leaves Us homesick, who behind,
Except that it is gone
Are ignorant of its Concern
As if it were not born.
Through all their former Places, we
Like Individuals go
Who something lost, the seeking for
Is all that's left them, now --
Captures that persistent, aching homesickness for the deceased — the sense of being permanently displaced by loss
You are no more, but sunken in a sea
Sheer into dream, ten thousand leagues, you fell ;
And now you lie green-golden, while a bell
Swings with the tide, my heart : and all is well
Till I look down, and wavering, the spell —
Your loveliness — returns. There in the sea,
Where you lie amber-pale and coral-cool,
You are most loved, most lost, most beautiful.
Drowns grief in dreamlike sea imagery — the lost one is treasured most in their unreachable transformation
Swifter far than summer's flight--
Swifter far than youth's delight--
Swifter far than happy night,
Art thou come and gone--
As the earth when leaves are dead,
As the night when sleep is sped,
As the heart when joy is fled,
I am left lone, alone.
The swallow summer comes again--
The owlet night resumes her reign--
But the wild-swan youth is fain
To fly with thee, false as thou.--
My heart each day desires the morrow;
Sleep itself is turned to sorrow;
Vainly would my winter borrow
Sunny leaves from any bough.
Speaks to the dragging aftermath — youth and joy gone for good, leaving you lonely and past caring
What needs complaints,
When she a place
Has with the race
Of saints?
In endless mirth,
She thinks not on
What's said or done
In earth:
She sees no tears,
Or any tone
Of thy deep groan
She hears;
Nor does she mind,
Or think on't now,
That ever thou
Wast kind:--
Suggests the beloved's happiness elsewhere may loosen grief’s hold, easing the weight of sorrow
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.
Shows grief as a call into the silence — still reaching past the grave even when no answer comes