Classic Poem

'Tis almost sunrise; I had long to wait.
I hear the early birds begin their songs;
Would 't were the last. Yet I believe and feel
That life grows weaker, and so it must end,
Nor far away.
How foolish in me still
These shallow, hurried notes to scrawl.
Here will they mold, with those, — the letters!
And the faithful books that true remain,
Silent though speaking, ranged upon the stones,
Facing the long procession of the years, —
Schiller and Shakspere, Spenser, with they dreamed
That things they wrote should float thus far away,
And in such places, here in these rank woods
Nourish an outlaw's breast, haggard with crime,
Save mine, far from all human eyes;
For in your trade-mad town, on Como's street,
Who lives who ever read them? Know I not.
Would I could live and yet destroy no life;
Yet neither roots nor nuts, nor berries scant,
Will save me from destruction. These dim wilds
In their game furnish a thin subsistence,
And I have sworn to breathe till my last sigh
Falls wretchedly to death. Live must I call it?
Once did I live, and knew the morning break
As the sweet herald of auspicious day,
Wherein my thoughts should bloom even as its blush.
Like radiance o'er the east my hopes shot forth.
The world was all before me and its friends, —
Those polite liars, those true, faithful friends.
On no man yet I ever turned my back.
I was affectionate, or so I thought;
I trusted all, and trustful, tried to please.
They shook me from them like the poisoned snake
Whose venom drops when none affects the cause.
My warm affections, my soft sympathies,
They rated oddity, named them brief whim,
Caprices, and the wiser called me mad,
The least reprieve they gave, to glance aside,
Neglect me; cold contempt, indifference,
Silent aversion, indolent remark,
Their sole returns. —

Was that a figure
Moving among the trees, there, where the sun
Begins to gild their moss? Like Gordon's form, —
Just crossing through the glade from where I sit.
Why, 't is a deer, and bends this way to me,
I'll get my gun, shut to my dungeon's door.
And I can feel its soft and liquid eye
Beam on this gloomy cell in friendly fear.
I could not shoot if this viper at my heart
Consumed its blood. Shoot, poor thing!
Never till now,
Driven by hunger was I weeping forced
To slay one living creature, nor to harm.
Nor should I now; 't is part of this dread penance,
And I live by murder.
Could be that Gordon's soul
Impressed itself upon that silly deer,
To tempt a hunter's thought? Its liquid eye,
Perhaps, prefigures happier days in store?
No, no! the same, the gnawing at my heart,
And carking care from anguish unappeased.
Why do I keep those letters yet, so near?
Near, ever in my eyes, and the twin portraits, —
Lisa's and his, — ever, forever there!
Was there no God with pity in his heart
When I lay cradled on my mother's breast?
Or was this fiend who tears my life to shreds
The One who made me, blasted and obscured?
I dreamed in calmer days of pleasing thoughts,
Blest recollections, which like soothing lights
O'ershot my morbid glooms, and made a hope
Of earth, lit up the dark, cold lakes with joy,
And touched the freezing foliage till it laughed;
Honeyed remembrances of good deeds done,

Like angel hymns soft fluting o'er the mind,
Banishing sin and binding up time's wounds.
The unappeasable sky above me shuts
Its iron lids 'gainst every cheerful thought;
No day nor night, nor early morn nor eve,
Nor shapes of things to come nor those all gone,
Are neighbor to my cause.
What moves yon bush?
'Tis but the frost-work lightening in the sun,
That gives it verge to move, to right its stems
From the cold grasp of night. These things are loved.
The glade that stoops across the long-drawn wood,
Its unshorn grasses for the deer's supply,
I sought again; a little sylvan temple,
With sober front carved by the wood-god's taste,
For Dryad meetings comfortably adorned.
Around the graceful trees move sensible.

To the sweet whisperings of the wind; the spring
Where nightly come the wild inhabitants,
To touch their lips, adorned with mossy stones,
Might please some hermit's mind.
Was I happy then?
Was there an hour deep in the past when life
Half kept some smiling dreams? My memory fails.
I fancy, as I seek that glade, my mind
Might, if 't were gracious, partly call again
Some thing or day that smiled across my path,
Ripe with humanity, before that blow
At my own race had shadowed all my soul,
And rooted out all trace of blest emotion.
Why did I love? Had I no joy in that?
I looked in Lisa's face; I saw her shape,
Light and convenient beyond Nature's art,
Made for our race; those hands that did her thought
Before my clumsy brain presumed her act;

That step so sure and sweet; that modest eye,
Ever self-humbling, ever soothing me.
I loved her all. Was not there, then, a joy?
Then, but how far off now! I am no more
Of life; all 's fled, all 's lost. —
Again, — her form!
As I was sitting in the glade, herself
Passed at the further end and near the spring.
Watching for deer I sat, for food is scarce.
My eyes were on the earth, my heart was faint,
And then I heard a voice. I raised my eyes.
Was it the oak-leaf falling in the frost?
Was it the torrent whispering down the glen?
She speaks, soft as the child who prays at night
His mother's blessing:
" Eliot! thou thread'st alone
The shadowy vale, save that my memory
Its penance bears along thy weary road.

Child to my heart all dear, I loved thee ever!
Nay, thou knew'st not that all my soul was thine.
Frenzied with jealousy, that maddening draught,
The aloes of the heart, and now rusted
With solitude, that by its acid eats
Away the truth; thought's vitriol, chasing
The fine conceit to ashes, rubbing out
The burnished silver of the social glass,
Reducing every pleasure to a mask;
A filmy skeleton, through which the breath
Of an unformed despair glides ghostly up,
As midnight's sigh in the cathedral's vault
Where overhead the falling ruins soar. "

Methought I knew that voice. Was that his form?
This hunger at my heart and this fatigue!
I surely saw a figure cross the glen,
As I glanced back, its hands upon its heart.
Gordon, no! no! It was not murder, no!

At twenty paces, killed — was he killed by me?
Oh, mockery! I am frenzied with this life.
Ilunger and cold and weariness steal all sense,
An everlasting faintness in my frame,
And in my mind the fatal consequence,
Brings forth its ghosts and dreams and fearful thoughts.
Were I not here alone in these wild woods,
Exiled from all which social life holds dear,
Locked in that burial vault, a diseased mind,
Malady naught can cure, — might not one heart,
One human heart with a brief tenderness,
E'en for me, say one half word of comfort, —
Breathe just one sigh, and with a faltering mind
Touch for an instant to my bleeding soul,
A hope of mercy!
My God! I ask for pardon.

But thou art just! Justice was made for me,
This miserable doom becomes me well.
A weaker nature might have sought its life;
But I, whose fibres, like the shattered oak's,
Wedged to the core with lightning, wreathe
Their pale, white phantoms to the angry sky,
And roots entwined in earth's unmeasured halls
Claim property their own; thus I, all scarred
And blasted, rained on, spat upon by hail,
And winter's silent moons, and still her voice,
Loud as the earthquake's trump, her still small voice:
" Eliot, my child, believe me to the end. "

I know I saw the sun rise; I believe
That somewhere in that distance was a world,

And once the woods lay green at summer's breath,
And soft the toying winds that danced in May.
There must have been a world, and human life.
I think I might remember childish forms, —
Their soft, wan hair; their little, lovely words;
Questions that break a grown man's heart with joy,
To think that God lets Innocence appear,
And in the weary, worn-out stage of life,
Paint her sweet dreams, the bliss of ignorance.
I had a sister once, cold as yon snow-crowned peak;
A friend, than Judas baser, who did worse,
Than sin, inexpiable crime, who blundered.
Thoughts had I once, anterior to that hour;
Once I had hopes, before all hopes were dead.

I half remember these things!
I must away!
Heavens! how faint I feel. The deer range far;
Slippery the frost shines gleaming down the trail.
That thought was rough, that I need kill these things,
So sacred in these haunts. I dare not keep a hound;
I cannot meet the glances of their eyes.
More than all human. When they lick my hand
They shudder at the touch; there 's blood upon it,
Which naught can wash away. No misery and no wrongs,
Nor day nor night, nor the unutterable voice
That yet forever asks me to repent,
Nor any strength that ever I possessed,
Nor these wild forms that glance across my path,
Can take the stains and clear them from my soul.

A deer! Hush! My rifle jarred! If it should fail
(I did not fail that day), then should I die
A hunter's death, — die, and the deer should live.
'Twere better so; they never kill their friends.