Our voices we had joined with song
Of bird ecstatic, light, and free;
Our laughter rollicked with the brook
Running through darkness merrily.
At purple eyes beside the rim
Of frozen lakes our loves we burned,
And slid away when stillness reigned:
Deep the vast woods our bodies urned.
In starlit night along the shade
Of our dusk tombs our spirits glide;
We hear the echoing of the wind,
We breathe the sighs we living sighed.
LIFE'S BURYING-GROUND.
My graveyard holds no once-loved human forms,
Grown hideous and forgotten, left alone,
But every agony my heart has known,—
The new-born trusts that died, the drift of storms.
I visit every day the shadowy grove;
I bury there my outraged tender thought;
I bring the insult for the love I sought,
And my contempt, where I had tried to love.
BEYOND UTTERANCE.
There in the midst of gloom the church-spire rose,
And not a star lit any side of heaven;
In glades not far the damp reeds coldly touched
Their sides, like soldiers dead before they fall;
There in the belfry clung the sleeping bat,—
Most abject creature, hanging like a leaf
Down from the bell-tongue, silent as the speech
The dead have lost ere they are laid in graves.
A melancholy prelude I would sing
To song more drear, while thought soars into gloom.
Find me the harbor of the roaming storm,
Or end of souls whose doom is life itself!
So vague, yet surely sad, the song I dream
And utter not. So sends the tide its roll,—
Unending chord of horror for a woe
We but half know, even when we die of it.