Poems

The vanishing encounter and evasion
Of things that were and were not in the room

XXIII

Vexed him forever; and his life forever
Immured and desolate,
Beating itself, with desperate endeavor,
But bruised itself, against the round of fate.

XXIV

The roses, in their slender vases burning,
Were quenchéd long before;
A dust was on the rhymes of love and yearning;
The shawl was like a shroud upon the floor.

XXV

Her music from the thrilling chords had perished;
The stillness was not moved
With memories of cadences long cherished,
The closes of the songs that she had loved.

XXVI

But not the less he felt her presence never
Out of the room depart;
Over the threshold, not the less, forever
He felt her going on his broken heart.

PLEASURE-PAIN

“Das Vergnügen ist Nichts als ein höchst angenehmer Schmerz.”–

    Heinrich Heine.

I

Full of beautiful blossoms
Stood the tree in early May:
Came a chilly gale from the sunset,
And blew the blossoms away;

Scattered them through the garden,
Tossed them into the mere:
The sad tree moaned and shuddered,
“Alas! the Fall is here.”

But all through the glowing summer
The blossomless tree throve fair,
And the fruit waxed ripe and mellow,
With sunny rain and air;

And when the dim October
With golden death was crowned,
Under its heavy branches
The tree stooped to the ground.

In youth there comes a west-wind
Blowing our bloom away,–
A chilly breath of Autumn
Out of the lips of May.

We bear the ripe fruit after,–
Ah, me! for the thought of pain!–
We know the sweetness and beauty
And the heart-bloom never again.

II

One sails away to sea,
One stands on the shore and cries;
The ship goes down the world, and the light
On the sullen water dies.

The whispering shell is mute,
And after is evil cheer:
She shall stand on the shore and cry in vain,
Many and many a year.

But the stately, wide-winged ship
Lies wrecked on the unknown deep;
Far under, dead in his coral bed,
The lover lies asleep.

III

Through the silent streets of the city,
In the night’s unbusy noon,
Up and down in the pallor
Of the languid summer moon,

I wander, and think of the village,
And the house in the maple-gloom,
And the porch with the honeysuckles
And the sweet-brier all abloom.

My soul is sick with the fragrance
Of the dewy sweet-brier’s breath: