I seek your lips and press them not,
My own are parched with pain;
My aching eyes are dim and hot—
My soul hopes on in vain.
The day is gone, and you are lost,
The night for me is lone—
And through its hours I count the cost
Of days without my own.
HELL
Hell holds no terror I shall ever fear,
For earth when you are absent is my hell;
Nor thought of meeting can my torment quell,
For loneliness is black, and cold, and drear.
This hell is dark! My passion is a flame!
Its anguish is a never dying fire,
And longing—hope that never dare aspire,
But die, in loneliness from whence it came.
Heav’n though is kind and lets me sometimes in,
Then hell is all forgotten, and its woe
Fades like the dew dispersed by summer’s morn,
And I am purged of all my pain and sin.
Such moments shine like jewels—then I go
Back to the dreary hell where pain was born.
ALONE
The mocking fiends by day
Make frenzied play
Around my loneliness;
The haunting sprites delight
To sport at night,
And jeer at my soul’s wretchedness;
Imprisoned in the boundary of a mind
Holding but one thought; only one can find
The thought of you!
You, far away,
In silence wrapped.
With all Hell’s crew
About me gay,
And I in loneliness am trapped.
Not God nor Devil ease
The torture of a lonely soul,
For haunting thoughts will cling,
And naught relief can bring—
No recreation please.
Grim misery must take its toll
Of tears and pain—
And work is vain!
The vanquished mind in scorn
Sneers on its child;
His work, and damns it be forlorn,
And with it all creative work
Henceforward be reviled.
Work? Where? Not here! Within these walls?
Work! What? Come, try it now,
And answer every thought that calls
In every moment. Tell me how
One single minute, pray,
My mind can get away
From her, the absent one—
Come, tell me, and my work is done.
The air! Go out and roam the field.
Sit in the sun—or rain;
Or count the stars again;
Or tell the steps long footsore journeys have revealed.
Do something. Go! But what?
What, leave that thought behind?
Where go? Where that is not
The burden of my mind?
Forget. Why, all the fiends of midnight hours
Yell that drab word at me; it falls in showers
Of rattling drops,
And never stops,
Until my ears
Nigh burst,
And I accurst
With all Hell’s fears!
Still there are moments when
Relief comes to my ken,
Then I admire my torturer sublime.
The silence of her absence is like time
A million years beyond this day—
Like stillness of forgotten tombs,
Where Nineveh, once gay,
Stood mighty, where now the sandstorm booms
O’er a desert quite as lonely as my heart.
She leaves me, like a queen, to bear the smart
Of her superb indifference and calm—
Unconscious of the harm
Such loneliness can do!