But O rejected! O in vain!
I cannot give who would not keep.
I cannot buy, I cannot gain,
I cannot give her half my sleep.
FREE WILL
Dear are some hidden things
My soul has sealed in silence; past delights,
Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings,
Remembered in the nights.
But my best treasures are
Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold;
Yet O! profounder hoards oracular
No reliquaries hold.
There lie my trespasses,
Abjured but not disowned. I’ll not accuse
Determinism, nor, as the Master [26] says,
Charge even “the poor Deuce.”
Under my hand they lie,
My very own, my proved iniquities,
And though the glory of my life go by
I hold and garner these.
How else, how otherwhere.
How otherwise, shall I discern and grope
For lowliness? How hate, how love, how dare,
How weep, how hope?
THE TWO QUESTIONS
“A riddling world!” one cried.
“If pangs must be, would God that they were sent
To the impure, the cruel, and passed aside
The holy innocent!”
But I, “Ah no, no, no!
Not the clean heart transpierced; not tears that fall
For a child’s agony; not a martyr’s woe;
Not these, not these appal.