Classic Poem

It droops and dies in morning light—
The rose that yesterday was whole:
‘Ah, whither, on the wind of night,
Is borne the fragrance of my soul?’

It sinks upon the ocean zone—
The wind that marred the tender rose:
‘Ah, whither has the fragrance flown,
And what shall give my soul repose?’

It breaks upon the rocky shore—
The vast, tumultuous, grieving sea:
‘Ah, never, never, never more
Can love and peace come back to me!’

It sobs, far up the lonely sky,
It faints in regions of the blest—
The endless, bitter, human cry,
And only Death could tell the rest.

White clouds, lone wand'ring o'er the wastes that sever
My sorrowing soul from her it loves in vain,
Waft to her heart, whom I have lost forever,
This last sad cry of passion and of pain.

Tell her, for many a year my spirit waited,
Now in faith's rapture, now in doubt's chill gloom,
For her, the angel-born, divinely fated
To be at once my glory and my doom.

Tell her I know how very far asunder
The lonely currents of our lives must be:
For her the summer sky, with roses under,
For me the rain-cloud and the sobbing sea.

Yet, could she feel how dark this world is growing
For him whose sad eyes see her drift away,—
A shadow, ever pale and paler showing
In evening twilight, cold, and bleak, and gray,—

Perchance her lips, remembering my caresses,
Her heart, yet thrilling with the throbs of mine,
Would once more turn to him whose grief confesses
Love's vain and madd'ning struggle to resign.

Ah, to forget—and conquer in forgetting!
But death alone this stormy heart can quell:—
Sad star of hope, now hasten to thy setting,
And, O, bright goddess of my life, Farewell!

A CALM cold face as white and clear
As marble, and as passionless:
Eyes darkly sad, that tell no fear,
No hope, no pleasure, no distress:

A smile, that seems all o'er to sleep,
As sleeps a sunbeam on a stone;
A gentle voice, but soft and deep,
And full of music, every tone;

A courtly manner,—he is true
To social usage, and will pay
To all the world its proper due
Of graceful, stately courtesy:—

Behold, an awful thought it is
That such a ghastly, gaunt despair
Can wear a shape so grand as this,
A face so noble and so fair!

For that is not a common grief
Which tears his heart and burns his brain
Who feels eternity too brief
For his tremendous trance of pain!

Whose soul endures infernal woes,
Enchained by some infernal spell;
Who knows not peace, but only knows
The lurid, withering fires of hell!