For I would not that of my kind
There should, of his unbiassed mind,
Have been one known
Who such a stroke could have designed;
Since it would augur works and ways
Below the lowest that man assays
To have hurled that stone
Into the sunshine of our days!
And if it prove that no man did,
And that the Inscrutable, the Hid,
Was cause alone
Of this foul crash our lives amid,
I’ll go in due time, and forget
In some deep graveyard’s oubliette
The thing whereof I groan,
And cease from troubling; thankful yet
Time’s finger should have stretched to show
No aimful author’s was the blow
That swept us prone,
But the Immanent Doer’s That doth not know,
Which in some age unguessed of us
May lift Its blinding incubus,
And see, and own:
“It grieves me I did thus and thus!”
LOVE THE MONOPOLIST
(Young Lover’s Reverie)
The train draws forth from the station-yard,
And with it carries me.
I rise, and stretch out, and regard
The platform left, and see
An airy slim blue form there standing,
And know that it is she.
While with strained vision I watch on,
The figure turns round quite
To greet friends gaily; then is gone . . .
The import may be slight,
But why remained she not hard gazing
Till I was out of sight?
“O do not chat with others there,”
I brood. “They are not I.
O strain your thoughts as if they were
Gold bands between us; eye
All neighbour scenes as so much blankness
Till I again am by!