V
Yes, you are dead like all the other dead.
You are not here, but I am here alone.
And evening falls, fusing tree, water and stone
Into a violet cloth, and the frail ash-tree hisses
With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.
And a steamer softly puffing along the river passes,
Drawing a file of barges; and silence falls again.
And a bell tones; and the evening darkens; and in sparse rank
The greenish lights well out along the other bank.
I have no force left now; the sights and sounds impinge
Upon me unresisted, like raindrops on the mould.
And, striving not against my melancholy mood,
Limp as a door that hangs upon one failing hinge,
Limp, with slack marrowless arms and thighs, I sit and brood
On death and death and death. And quiet, thin and cold,
Following of this one friend the hopeless, helpless ghost,
The weak appealing wraiths of notable men of old
Who died, pass through the air; and then, host after host,
Innumerable, overwhelming, without form,
Rolling across the sky in awful silent storm,
The myriads of the undifferentiated dead
Whom none recorded, or of whom the record faded.
O spectacle appallingly sublime!
I see the universe one long disastrous strife,
And in the staggering abysses of backward and forward time
Death chasing hard upon the heels of creating life.
And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones
Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over,
Onward and never returning, leaving no mark behind.
There's nothing to hope for. Blank cessation numbs my mind,
And I feel my heart thumping gloomy against its cover,
My heavy belly hanging from my bones.