We should restrain our anguish;—(merciless,
Albeit it is, and bitter cruel the grave:)—
Grief wrings our dead with more than grief’s distress,
Earth chaining love, bound by the lips that rave.
And curse not death!—Yea, rather let us bless
That conqueror who makes us less a slave!
To principles of passion and of pride;
To sin and circumstance and lust and law!
Slave to all these, like rags now flung aside!—
Wouldst have the soul resume them, and withdraw
From its inheritance, where, as a bride,
It stands arrayed in glory and in awe?
“Unjust”?—God is not. Yea, hast thou not all,
All that thou ever hadst when this dull clay,
Thy well belovéd, made the spiritual
A restless vassal of the night and day?
This hath been thine and is: the cosmic call
Rang through this house, and took its own away.
But man, in selfishness, from its estate,—
Won with what pains and devastating cares,
What bootless battling with resistless fate,
What mailed endeavor with unyielding years,—
Would bar the soul, Heaven grants him here as mate,
And being compelled, returns Heaven’s loan with tears.
SLEEP
Look in my eyes!—Oh, the mild and mysterious
Deeps of thine eyes that are holy with rest!—
Sigh to me! yea, as thy kinsman, imperious
Love, might, with lips that are soft and delirious,
Soft with such comfort as blesses the blessed.
Fold all my soul in the mild and mysterious
Might of thy rest.
All the night for thy love, all the night! while the gladdening
Presence of darkness, as legends of old,
Wraps me in poesy: none of the saddening
Prose of the day that is sad with the maddening
Soul of unrest that is heartless and cold.
All the night for thy love, all the night! and its gladdening
Beauty of old.
Scorn is not thine nor is hate; but the bubbling
Fountains of strength that are youthful as morn’s:
Hurt is not thine of remembrance; nor troubling
Sorrows of waking whose fingers keep doubling—
Pressing on temples life’s cares that are thorns.
Thine are the hours of the stars and the bubbling
Wells of the morns.
Pride and the passions and labors that worry us
Mix with and brutalize; envy and spite
Of the heart; and the griefs of the soul that oft hurry us
On, with the iron of anguish, and bury us,—
Touch them and calm with thy fingers of white.
Make all these passions and pains, that oft worry us,
Night with the night.
Silence hath built thee a mansion, where flowery
Fields of the visions are poppied with dreams;
Where the high mountains of quiet loom showery
Under the stars; and the valleys of bowery
Lotus and moly gleam, misty with streams:
Where slumber’s halcyon waters thrid flowery
Pastures of dreams.