He arouses from his abstraction, buries his face in his hands and thinks:
So long it seems since last I saw her face,
So long ago it seems,
Like some sad soul in unconjectured space,
Still seeking happiness through perished grace
And unrealities, a little while
Illusions lead me, ending in the smile
Of Death, triumphant in a thorny place,
Among Love’s ruined roses and dead dreams.
Since she is gone, no more I feel the light,—
Since she has left all dark,—
Cleave, with its revelation, all the night.
I wander blindly, on a crumbling height,
Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones
Of Life, where Hope, amid Life’s skulls and bones,
With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,
Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.
Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o’erawe,—
Now she is gone from me,—
Questions God’s justice that seems full of flaw,
As is His world, where misery is law,
And all men fools, too willing to be slaves.—
My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,
The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,
And all is night and I no longer see.
VI
He looks from his window toward the sombre west:
Ridged and bleak the gray, forsaken
Twilight at the night has guessed;
And no star of dusk has taken
Flame unshaken in the west.
All day long the woodlands, dying,
Moaned, and drippings as of grief
Rained from barren boughs with sighing
Death of flying twig and leaf.
Ah, to live a life unbroken
Of the flings and scorns of fate!
Like that tree, with branches oaken,
Strength’s unspoken intimate.—
Who can say that we have never
Lived the life of plants and trees?—
Not so wide the lines that sever
Us forever here from these.