Classic Poem

Husband — What! have I been sleeping? Have I dreamed? Was he not here? —
" Dead"? Should I not know that? Murdered! — start not, all my brain is clear:
Listen, Agnes, to the secret I have kept so many a year.

For I must not keep it longer; no, when I am lying dead,
When the next year's grass is growing green above my dreamless head,
I would have you tell my darling what her dying mother said.

Tell her I was madly jealous — could not bear that there should be
Any shadow of a turning in her precious love for me;
But the lapse from love to pity! this I dared not live to see.

So I charge you, so I swear you, wait until the grass above
Him and me has thrown one mantle and the cooing turtledove
Mourned for me there all the summer, ere you rob my grave of love.

For my sleep must be beside him — keeper, you will promise this? —
Close beside him, in some semblance of the old remembered bliss
When I lay in those arms folded and all heaven was his kiss.

That sweet love of me was first love, and it wrought in him like pain,
Earnest so, and sad, and tender — O! the thought burns through my brain —
Fear not, Agnes! — I am dying — dying, and I will be sane.

Heavens, how that dear heart loved me! But I was a favored child,
Whom the fondness of weak parents had to selfishness beguiled —
Had made willful, proud, exacting, and with wayward passions wild.

Yet I loved him all my nature; and with tears mine eyes would swim
Oft in thinking, were there needed such a sacrifice for him,
I would gladly give my body to be rended limb from limb.

But right soon I felt the distance of his thought from thought of mine —
Felt his purpose to uplift me (true, it gave no outward sign),
And my selflove flashed resentful toward that love so all benign.

To my mother I was angel; to my father I was queen;
Why to husband should there failing, fault, or flaw in me be seen?
Why to him was I not perfect, with this perfect love between?

With such questions in my bosom rose my anger and my pride;
All my will I set against him, all his will for me defied,
And disdained to live his living, though for him I would have died.

I would be my self-creator, not a creature of his own,
In the fashion of his fancy made by him for him alone;
He should have me as he took me, crowned and set upon a throne!

Keeper, think what secret devil must have whispered in my heart!
I conceived he did not love me, deemed his fondness was but art
To conceal from me his feeling that we were so far apart.

I was jealous of his silence — made him swear it o'er and o'er
That he loved me, loved me, loved me, and would love me evermore;
Then with taunting tears I chid him that so lovelessly he swore.

He grew sad, and I grew sullen: some strange fury in me stirred
When we tried to speak together and he pleaded to be heard,
And I stung his soul to anguish with the woman's last rash word.

Never I his wish considered; what he liked not I would praise;
What he cherished as conviction I would scoff at as but craze;
And I said that, though I loved him, yet I hated all his ways.

He was generous, but human; and at times his anger rose,
In what words of hot resentment only Heaven's mercy knows;
And the man's uprising always had the woman's stormy close.

Thus unwisely, thus unwifely ran this violence its course,
Aiming to compel affection, bent to conquer love by force;
Till our travesty of marriage was but masking of divorce.

But our little daughter Zilpah was the rainbow on the gloom —
Tell her, Agnes; she may know this ere you lay me in the tomb —
She was like a rainbow on them when the clouds in heaven loom.

Yes, the darling was the rainbow which our love had seemed to send
As the token of a promise that the tempest now should end
And along whose span our spirits should together run and blend.

With the babe upon my bosom, though I would not pardon crave,
Yet the wrongs my words had done him, O! I knew he all forgave;
But I doubt if he forgets them in the all-forgetful grave.

While his hungry fond eyes uttered more than human lips could say,
Still I saw his lips were longing, if he dared, to give away
All his soul to me in converse that sweet morning in the May.

And he dared not! God of heaven, that I was so hard and cold!
That so near his dear babe pressing, him so far off I should hold!
With my face all steel against him, while my heart for him was gold!

Yes, dear keeper, it was madness; in your eyes I read the thought:
It would be a thing expected that a spirit so distraught
And distorted out of nature should at last be hither brought.

Peace for us was truce of passion. O'er a deep of hopes and fears,
On a thin glare ice of silence we had glided through the years
Of the infancy of Zilpah — then the world sank drowned in tears!

He his whole heart lavished on her; and she grew to love him so,
By companionship and heirship so his own she seemed to grow,
That I feared to her his largeness all my littleness would show.

So I grudged him her caresses; though his face, grown pale and thin,
Should have pleaded me the hunger that his heart had famished in,
On his cheek the hectic telling how life-deep the pang had been.

Then, at last, I madly charged him with contriving to displace
Mother in her child's affection — Lamb of God! is, is there grace? —
Shocked he turned a sad look on me, and — I struck him in the face!

Hah! blood on his lips! " O husband! darling! darling!" My wild shriek
Brought in Zilpah running breathless; in our arms he, deadly weak,
Sank with us, I wailing, crying, " O my husband! do not speak!"

Through his parted lips came streaming the red torrent of his life,
With the struggling, drowning last words, " Love me — daughter, dear — dear wife!"
Words that struck my brain and killed it, like the stabbing of a knife.

Out of earth I seemed whirled upward to the dead and frozen moon;
From the far-off world rose Zilpah's weird, low, sobbing, dying croon:
" O, so hard! hard! so hard, father! so hard, darling! and so soon!"

Then befell the blessed darkness; darkness with no ray of light;
Sun, nor moon, nor star of memory: keeper, how long was the night? —
No, not " five"; for, two years surely, I the days remember right.

Seven hundred three and forty — I have counted them all through —
Days or dreams — I counted, Agnes; I had nothing else to do
Through the long nights, adding, waiting if the same dream would come true.

Dreams they were, at first, of Zilpah; changed from dreams to days at last —
What! " all days of all the five years Zilpah here with me has passed"?
O my darling! can death bear it from such love to be outcast?

What! " you have an opened letter, writ to Zilpah by his hand!
Left for me to read if ever I should come to understand
In her absence"! Read it, Agnes, though it me with murder brand!

HIS LETTER

" Darling little daughter Zilpah: Now let not your dear heart bleed!
Think of me at peace and happy when these lines you come to read;
Think how you were all my solace; think of mother in her need.

" She will feel the shock more deeply, since, you know, we have not dared
Tell her of these fatal bleedings, and she will not be prepared;
So her pain will be the greater by the pain our love has spared.

" You, my Zilpah, you expect it; and I catch your anxious eye
Always following your father; even now you hover nigh
Where this letter I sit writing, to be read not till I die.

" When the last comes, you will bravely for sweet mother's sake upbear;
I foresee how she will need you — if she die — or when or where —
Fail not thou to lay her by me" — —
Agnes, lift me! air, more air!

Dying — but the letter! Keeper, help me live to hear it all!
Higher — so! Now read on! — Hold me! — no, no, Agnes, let me fall!
Zilpah! — Husband! — in the darkness! groping, groping to — your — call!