Classic Poem

It was Despair,
He roll'd his large red eye around,
And laid his wither'd hand upon the lyre;
Then woke that strain so wildly terrible,
That Madness
Ceas'd for awhile her idiot grin, and Fear
Call'd Disappointment from his iron cell,
To pause and listen while his own pale cheek
Grew paler.

II.

It was Despair:
The man of dark imaginings,
Who sits him sullen on some blasted heath,
Which the pale moom-beam saddens, not relieves;
There raving,
Fashioning shapes huge, strange, and horrible,
And starting wild, he points at vacancy,
And to the spirits of the night-blast tells
His sorrows.

III.

He asks not aid,
Nor does the big sigh heave his breast,
Nor does the sorrowful tear suffuse his eyes,
For sighs and tears bespeak a spirit worn,
Not withered;
Bended, not broken: they are like the rains
That bless the plains they deluge, when the flow'rs
E'en while they bend beneath their weight, are seen
Reviving.

IV.

There was a light,
That us'd to flit across his path,
Lonely, yet lovely, and it cheer'd his soul,
And he would cherish it, and call it Hope:
That vanish'd—
And he must wander now despairingly,
Where never taper lends its little ray,
Where never moon must soothe, and never sun
Shall gladden.

V.

Despair is Death:
And though he come not in the storm
That blasts the roses, yet he lurks unseen,
Eating their core away, and o'er them sheds
His mildew:
While of such sad, sad change, the cause and cure
Alike unknown, we can but mourn the flow'rs
That look less beautiful and count the leaves
That wither.

VI.

Thou Sun of heaven!
Tho' thou art cheerful, and he dull
As blackest night, Despair resembles thee;
Fierce as thou art, and lasting as thou seem'st,
His sorrows
Thy setting sees the same pale marble cheeks,
Thy rising radiance vainly strove to gild;
The same dull eye's fix'd glare, the same wild steps,
Still wand'ring.

VII.

Yet he can smile
With seeming careless jollity,
And o'er the goblet gay will join the laugh,
And strive to play the courtier deftily.
But vainly—
The worm that fattens in the dead man's socket,
Looks not less like the life that glitter'd there,
Than that faint smile, the heart-exulting mirth
It mimics.

VIII.

O saddest lot!
Thus barely doom'd to breathe and be,
To wander up and down this care-bound sphere,
And only know we live, because we feel
Life's sorrows;
And only shrink from death because we fear
The grave itself may hold some dream like life,
And even that dark slumber may not be
Unbroken.