In the silence of his room. After many days:
All, all are shadows. All must pass
As writing in the sand or sea:
Reflections in a looking-glass
Are not less permanent than we.
The days that mold us—what are they?
That break us on their whirling wheel?
What but the potters! we the clay
They fashion and yet leave unreal.
Linked through the ages, one and all,
In long anthropomorphous chain,
The human and the animal
Inseparably must remain.
Within us still the monstrous shape
That shrieked in air and howled in slime,
What are we?—partly man and ape—
The tools of fate, the toys of time!
II
The bitterness of his bereavement speaks in him:
Vased in her bedroom window, white
As her glad girlhood, never lost,
I smelt the roses—and the night
Outside was fog and frost.
What though I claimed her dying there!
God nor one angel understood
Nor cared, who from sweet feet to hair
Had changed to snow her blood.
She had been mine so long, so long!
Our harp of life was one in word—
Why did death thrust his hand among
The chords and break one chord!