What world-agony distils its poignancy this day?
What pain-laden heart pours out its exhaustless lay
Of tormenting woe and tortured silences?

From the far reaches of the marshland
Along and beyond the crescent-bed of the sea-sand
What tempest on the wave's-strings makes its cadences?

The distant hills dimmed like dull and forgotten dreams
Raise their shadowy heads where pour in streams
The tears of the heart-hollowed mourners of the skies;

While into the turgid heart of the fens at their feet
Turbidly fall and dance sheet upon sheet
To the measureless measure of the wind's empty sighs.

No light but a dismal gray, that neither throbs nor quivers
On the torn banks of the heavens' cloud-rivers,
But stonily stands still, like death that dies never.

Not-dead, but a weeping world bathing its corpses--
Its memories, its lost hopes, in regret's hearses
To be buried in flowerless graves, without incense or prayer.

It writhes in agony, rolls out in undulating rills,
This rain-melody from the sea-waves to the farthest hills,
Thence to the dreary distance lost to hearing or sight.

It is all dark and dank, a mourning of earth and heaven,
Sorrow-laden, life-weary, long-lost, death-craven,
A day lost to time, a light more baleful than night.

No dead these, but a living death seeking peace
From the furies--their own thoughts--sorrow--surcease,
Kissing the lashing wind thinking it to be the breeze.

Pour, pour, pour, O relentless, exhaustless pain!
To the measure of thine own agony, thy woe's refrain,
These desolate streams of thy music, thy pangs of a million seas.