And yet, yea verily, thy love was true;
I would not wrong thee with another thought:
I would not enter at the gates of heaven
By thinking else than that thy love was true.
But I obtain no response to my cries,
Making within my soul all void, and cold,
And comfortless.
Ay, empty, as this grate,
Of life, wherefrom the fire has well nigh fled,
Leaving but chasmed ugliness and ruin:
And weak as faltering of these taper flames
Half sunken in their sockets, by whose gleam
I see, though faintly, where my books stand ranged
Most mute; though sometime eloquent to me;
And where my pictures hang with other forms
Instinct from what I know: where friends portrayed
Like ghosts loom on me from another world.
Then what remains, but, like a child worn out
With weeping, that I sink me down to rest,
To sleep, not dream—and if I could to die?
III. MY LADY’S VOICE FROM HEAVEN.
I had been sitting by her tomb
In torpor one dark night;
When fitful tremours shook the doom
Of cold lethargic settled gloom,
That weighed upon my sight:
And while I sat, and sickly heaves
Disturbed my spirit’s sloth,
A wind came, blown o’er distant sheaves,
That hissing, tore and lashed the leaves
And lashed the undergrowth:
It roared and howled, it raged about
With some determined aim;
And storming up the night, brought out
The moon, that like a happy shout,
Called forth My Lady’s name,
In sudden splendour on the stone.
Then, for an instant, I
Snatched and heaped up my past, bestrown
With hopes and kisses, struggling moan,
And pangs: as suddenly,
Oppressed with overwhelming weight,
Down fell the edifice;
When touched, as by the hand of Fate,
My gloom was gone. I felt my state
So light, I sobbed for bliss.
The loud winds, spent in seeking rest,
Dropped dead. My fevered brow
Drank coolness from the grass it pressed;
And in my desolated breast
A change began to grow,
While feeling those tears slowly drain
The load of grief which had
A sluggish curse within me lain,
Save when remembrance wrought my brain
For vivid moments mad.