The natural things are the same in Massachusetts—but here they seem someway even older. You feel the breath of the very long-ago among the wildness of green—as if only human beings had come and gone, but it had never changed its smallest twig or grass-blade. It seems but waiting, and its patience in the waiting is without end.
Away on the other side of the tree-covered mountain I have seen a flat, gently-curved, country road with the sunshine upon it and a few little English sparrows alighting and flying along it and picking at grains. And the grass by the road-side was tall and rank and sweet to the senses, and the road led to farms and the river and the wildwood. Cows were feeding by a shallow brook, and there were sumach bushes, thick and dark, near by.
For several minutes when my eyes rested upon this I felt absolutely content with all of life.
While I’m telling you this, Annabel Lee, I am not quite sure you are listening—and for myself, I see you much more than anything I have talked about. I am wondering how it is possible that you have lived only fourteen years—even the fourteen years of a Japanese woman. And I see again in my mind—your red lips, and your dead-black hair, and your purple eyes, and your wonderful hands, and your forehead with the widow’s peak, and the two short side-locks that curve around, and your slimness in the scarlet and gold-embroidered gown.
And most of all I see your eyes when they are full of soft purple shadows, and your lips when they are tender—and your heart, as I have seen it before, and its depths which are of the white purity.
Last night there was the vision of you with your purple eyes wide and gazing down at me with the white lids still. And I was horror-struck at the look of world-weariness in them—how that it is terrible, how that it follows one into the darkness and light, how that it is grief and rage and madness, how that it makes the heart ache until all the life-nerves ache with it—and there is no end; how that it is life and death, and one can not escape!—a world of tears and entreating and vows; but no, there is no escape.
And then again I looked up at your purple eyes gazing down at me full of strong, high scorn and triumph. “Do you think we have not conquered life?” they said. “Do you think we can not crush out all the little demons that presume to torture? Do you think we can not conquer everything? Who is there that we have not known? Where is there that we have not been? Are there any still, still shadows that we have cringed before? Are there any brilliant lights upon the sky that we have not faced boldly and put aside? And the stones and the stars and the mists on the sea are less—less than we,—we are the greatest things of all.”
Thus your two eyes when I slept, and when I woke I saw you again as you have looked so many times—the expression of your red lips, and your voice with vague bitterness, and your lily face inscrutable.