Classic Poem

Your pale Egyptian eyelids used to stir
Faintly with laughter when I brought a jest.
You were mysterious as a sepulcher
To my young eyes; and that perhaps was best:
For a dim secret, none too good to know,
Must even then have had its dwelling-place
In your still bosom. I could come and go
Yet never read the silence of your face.
Then on a day the spirit in that tomb
Grew faint, and madness curtained up your eyes
With film on film of desolated gloom
Through which the soul I knew gave no replies —
Until that dawn of strange November rain
When you lay dead, and were yourself again.