I care not for the lie:
My grief is for the tortured breath
Of Truth that cannot die.
And cruelty, what that may be,
What creature understands?
But O, the glazing eyes of Love,
Stabbed through the open hands!
Two poems contained in The Singing Leaves are of a note far more serious and vital than that of their fellows: the first, “The Ravens;” the second, and to my thinking, the more important, “The Fool,” which from the standpoint of strength, feeling, forceful expression, idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, seems to me the achievement of the book. It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of experience:
O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,
To give for asking: yet again to trust