The silence in which he was most unhappy was a silence in poetry. Comparing his case to the earth's life in winter, "tearless beneath the frost-scorched sod," he writes:—
My lips have drought, and crack,
By laving music long unvisited.
Beneath the austere and macerating rime
Draws back constricted in their icy urns
The genial flame of Earth, and there
With torment and with tension does prepare
The lush disclosures of the vernal time.
His second period of melancholy was the more severe; he thought he saw in it, against all his convictions in regard to the rhythm or the resurrections of life, the signs of his poetry's final death. He suffered the torment and the tension in preparation for what he was convinced would be still-born song.
The depression first came upon him with the publication of New Poems—
"Though my aims are unfulfilled, my place insecure, many things warn me that with this volume I am probably closing my brief poetic career."
He had already written of himself as one
Whose gaze too early fell
Upon her ruinous eyes and ineludible.
In "The Sere of the Leaf," an early poem written at the end of 1890, and published in Merry England, January 1891, he answers Katharine Tynan, a poet who had spoken of a full content:—