Sadness

The circle is broken, one seat is forsaken,
One bud from the tree of our friendship is shaken;
One heart from among us no longer shall thrill
With joy in our gladness, or grief in our ill.

Weep! lonely and lowly are slumbering now
The light of her glances, the pride of her brow;
Weep! sadly and long shall we listen in vain
To hear the soft tones of her welcome again.

Give our tears to the dead! For humanity's claim
From its silence and darkness is ever the same;
The hope of that world whose existence is bliss
May not stifle the tears of the mourners of this.

For, oh! if one glance the freed spirit can throw
On the scene of its troubled probation below,
Than the pride of the marble, the pomp of the dead,
To that glance will be dearer the tears whic...

You bid me hold my peace
And dry my fruitless tears,
Forgetting that I bear
A pain beyond my years.

You say that I should smile
And drive the gloom away;
I would, but sun and smiles
Have left my life's dark day.

All time seems cold and void,
And naught but tears remain;
Life's music beats for me
A melancholy strain.

I used at first to hope,
But hope is past and, gone;
And now without a ray
My cheerless life drags on.

Like to an ash-stained hearth
When all its fires are spent;
Like to an autumn wood
By storm winds rudely shent,--

So sadly goes my heart,
Unclothed of hope and peace;
It asks not joy again,
But only seeks release.

Sorrow has touched thee, my beautiful boy!
And dimmed the bright eyes that were dancing with joy;
Thy ruby lips tremble, thy soft cheek is wet,
The tears on its roses are lingering yet.
On thy quick-heaving heart is thy little hand pressed;
There is care on thy brow--there is grief in thy breast,
And slowly and darkly the shadow steals o'er thee,
For the first time the vision of death is before thee!

Meet emblem of childhood--that innocent dove
Was the sharer alike of thy sports and thy love;
Thy playmate is dead--and that tenantless cage
Has stamped the first grief upon memory's page.
And oh!--thou art weeping--Life's fountain of tears,
Once unchained, will flow on through the desert of years;
No joy will e'er equal thy first dawn of bliss,
No sorrow blot ou...

In these rapid, restless shadows,
Once I walked at eventide,
When a gentle, silent maiden,
Walked in beauty at my side
She alone there walked beside me
All in beauty, like a bride.

Pallidly the moon was shining
On the dewy meadows nigh;
On the silvery, silent rivers,
On the mountains far and high
On the ocean’s star-lit waters,
Where the winds a-weary die.

Slowly, silently we wandered
From the open cottage door,
Underneath the elm’s long branches
To the pavement bending o’er;
Underneath the mossy willow
And the dying sycamore.

With the myriad stars in beauty
All bedight, the heavens were seen,
Radiant hopes were bright around me,
Like the light of stars serene;
Like the mellow midnight splendor
Of the Night’...

Is any one sad in the world, I wonder?
    Does any one weep on a day like this,
With the sun above, and the green earth under?
    Why, what is life but a dream of bliss?

With the sun, and the skies, and the birds above me,
    Birds that sing as they wheel and fly -
With the winds to follow and say they love me -
    Who could be lonely? O ho, not I!

Somebody said, in the street this morning,
    As I opened my window to let in the light,
That the darkest day of the world was dawning;
    But I looked, and the East was a gorgeous sight.

One who claims that he knows about it
    Tells me the Earth is a vale of sin;
But I and the bees and the birds - we doubt it,
    And think it a world worth living in.

Some one says that hearts are fi...

One man lights you with his ardour
one decks you in mourning, Nature!
What says to the first: ‘A Sepulchre!’
To the other cries: ‘Life and splendour!’


Unknown Hermes, who assists,
yet intimidates me as well,
you make me Midas’ equal,
the saddest of alchemists:


You help me change gold to iron,
paradise to hell’s kingdom:
in the shrouded atmosphere


I find a dear corpse, and on
the celestial shores, it’s there,
I build a mighty sepulcher.

The sad nights are here and the sad mornings,
The air is filled with portents and with warnings,
Clouds that vastly loom and winds that cry,
A mournful prescience
Of bright things going hence;
Red leaves are blown about the widowed sky,
And late disconsolate blooms
Dankly bestrew
The garden walks, as in deserted rooms
The parted guest, in haste to bid adieu,
Trinklets and shreds forgotten left behind,
Torn letters and a ribbon once so brave -
Wreckage none cares to save,
And hearts grow sad to find;
And phantom echoes, as of old foot-falls,
Wander and weary out in the thin air,
And the last cricket calls -
A tiny sorrow, shrilling "Where? ah! where?"

Bowed hearts that hold the saddest memories
Are the most beautiful; and such make sweet
Light happy moods of alien natures which
Their sadness contacts, and so sanctifies.

And such to me is an old, gabled house,
Deserted and neglected and unknown
Within the dreamy hollow of its hills,
Dark, cedared hills and fruitless orchards sear;
With but its host of shrouded memories
Haunting its low and desolate rooms and halls,
Its roomy hearths and cob-webbed crevices.

Here in dim rainy noons I love to sit,
And hear the running rain along the roof,
The creak and crack of noises that are born
Of unseen and mysterious agencies;
The dripping footfalls of the wind adown
Lone winding stairways massy-banistered;
A clapping door and then a sudden hush
Tha...

In the rosy light of my day's fair morning,
    Ere ever a storm cloud darkened the west,
Ere even a shadow of night gave warning
    When life seemed only a pleasure quest,
Why then all humour and comedy scorning -
    I liked high tragedy best.

I liked the challenge, the fierce fought duel,
    With a death or a parting in every act.
I liked the villain to be more cruel
    Than the basest villain could be in fact:
For it fed the fires of my mind with the fuel
    Of the things that my life lacked.

But as time passed on, and I met real sorrow,
    And she played at night on the stage -my heart,
I found I could not forget on the morrow
    The pain I had felt in her tragic part.
For alas! no longer I needed to borrow
    My grief from the act...

I mind me in the days departed,
How often underneath the sun
With childish bounds I used to run
To a garden long deserted.

The beds and walks were vanished quite;
And wheresoe'er had struck the spade,
The greenest grasses Nature laid
To sanctify her right.

I called the place my wilderness,
For no one entered there but I;
The sheep looked in, the grass to espy,
And passed it ne'ertheless.

The trees were interwoven wild,
And spread their boughs enough about
To keep both sheep and shepherd out,
But not a happy child.

Adventurous joy it was for me!
I crept beneath the boughs, and found
A circle smooth of mossy ground
Beneath a poplar tree.

Old garden rose-trees hedged it in,
Bedropt with roses waxen-white

Forget thine anguish,
Vexed heart, again.
Why shouldst thou languish,
With earthly pain?
The husk shall slumber,
Bedded in clay
Silent and sombre,
Oblivion's prey!
But, Spirit immortal,
Thou at Death's portal,
Tremblest with fear.
If he caress thee,
Curse thee or bless thee,
Thou must draw near,
From him the worth of thy works to hear.


Why full of terror,
Compassed with error,
Trouble thy heart,
For thy mortal part?
The soul flies home -
The corpse is dumb.
Of all thou didst have,
Follows naught to the grave.
Thou fliest thy nest,
Swift as a bird to thy place of rest.


What avail grief and fasting,
Where nothing is lasting?
Pomp, domination,
Become tribulation.
In a health-...

I am sorry in the gladness
    Of the joys that crown my days,
For the souls that sit in sadness
    Or walk uninviting ways.

On the radiance of my labour
    That a loving fate bestowed,
Falls the shadow of my neighbour,
    Crushed beneath a thankless load.

As the canticle of pleasure
    From my lovelit altar rolls,
There is one discordant measure,
    As I think of homeless souls.

And I know that grim old story,
    Preached from pulpits, is not so,
For no God could sit in glory
    And see sinners writhe below.

In that great eternal Centre
    Where all human life has birth,
Boundless love and pity enter
    And flow downward to the earth.

And all souls in sin or sorrow
    Are but passing through the...

O Poesy is on the wane,
For Fancy's visions all unfitting;
I hardly know her face again,
Nature herself seems on the flitting.
The fields grow old and common things,
The grass, the sky, the winds a-blowing;
And spots, where still a beauty clings,
Are sighing "going! all a-going!"
O Poesy is on the wane,
I hardly know her face again.

The bank with brambles overspread,
And little molehills round about it,
Was more to me than laurel shades,
With paths of gravel finely clouted;
And streaking here and streaking there,
Through shaven grass and many a border,
With rutty lanes had no compare,
And heaths were in a richer order.
But Poesy is on the wane,
I hardly know her face again.

I sat beside the pasture stream,
When Beauty's sel...

I

Peradventure of old, some bard in Ionian Islands,
    Walking alone by the sea, hearing the wash of the waves,
Learned the secret from them of the beautiful verse elegiac,
    Breathing into his song motion and sound of the sea.

For as the wave of the sea, upheaving in long undulations,
    Plunges loud on the sands, pauses, and turns, and retreats,
So the Hexameter, rising and singing, with cadence sonorous,
    Falls; and in refluent rhythm back the Pentameter flows?

II

Not in his youth alone, but in age, may the heart of the poet
    Bloom into song, as the gorse blossoms in autumn and spring.

III

Not in tenderness wanting, yet rough are the rhymes of our poet;
    Though it be Jacob's voice, Esau's, alas! are the hands.

Your love taught me to grieve
and I have been in need, for centuries
a woman to make me grieve
for a woman, to cry upon her arms
like a sparrow
for a woman to gather my pieces
like shards of broken crystal

Your love has taught me, my lady, the worst habits
it has taught me to read my coffee cups
thousands of times a night
to experiment with alchemy,
to visit fortune tellers

It has taught me to leave my house
to comb the sidewalks
and search your face in raindrops
and in car lights
and to peruse your clothes
in the clothes of unknowns
and to search foryour image
even.... even....
even in the posters of advertisements
your love has taught me
to wander around, for hours
searching for a gypsies hair
that all gyps...

Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,
Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.

Pause not! The time is past! Every voice cries, Away!
Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood:
Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.

Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.

The leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head:
The blooms of dewy spring shall gleam beneath thy feet:
But thy soul or this...

Leaden skies and a lonesome shadow
    Where summer has passed with her gorgeous train;
Snow on the mountain, and frost on the meadow -
    A white face pressed to the window pane;
A cold mist falling, a bleak wind calling,
    And oh! but life seems vain.

Rain is better than golden weather,
    When the heart is dulled with a dumb despair.
Dead leaves lie where they walked together,
    The hammock is gone, and the rustic chair.
Let bleak snows cover the whole world over -
    It will never again seem fair.

Time laughs lightly at youth's sad 'Never,'
    Summer shall come again, smiling once more,
High o'er the cold world the sun shines for ever,
    Hearts that seemed dead are alive at the core.
Oh, but the pain of it -oh, but the gain of it,

Silently without my window,
Tapping gently at the pane,
Falls the rain.
Through the trees sighs the breeze
Like a soul in pain.
Here alone I sit and weep;
Thought hath banished sleep.

Wearily I sit and listen
To the water's ceaseless drip.
To my lip
Fate turns up the bitter cup,
Forcing me to sip;
'T is a bitter, bitter drink,
Thus I sit and think,--

Thinking things unknown and awful,
Thoughts on wild, uncanny themes,
Waking dreams.
Spectres dark, corpses stark,
Show the gaping seams
Whence the cold and cruel knife
Stole away their life.

Bloodshot eyes all strained and staring,
Gazing ghastly into mine;
Blood like wine
On the brow--clotted now--
Shows death's dreadful sign.
Lonely vigil still ...