Classic Poem

I had a Love; it was so long ago,
So many long sad years:
She died; and then a waste of arid woe,
Never refreshed by tears:
She died so young, so tender, pure and fair;
I wandered in the Desert of Despair.

What kept me then from following my Love?
I ask in drear amaze;
What held me wingless from my flying Dove,
To tread Life's barren ways?
What drugged my keen intent, for bale or bliss,
To sink or soar in Death's most dark abyss?

How have I lived in this tremendous waste,
So long, so lone, so lorn?
No well-springs for my soul, no food to taste
For my poor heart forlorn;
No Love, no Faith, no Hope to pass the Sands
And sojourn in the friendly fruitful lands.

My heart hath fed upon itself, reply,
The bitter, poisoned meat!
My soul hath drunk its own scant sources dry,
Bitter as blood; my feet
Have trodden their old footsteps year by year,
Circling for ever in the desert drear.

Upon the burning sands and bruising stones
I plod the pathless ways;
Of all my fellow-creatures dry bleached bones
Are all that meet my gaze,
Or men and camels dying or just dead
With eager vultures hanging overhead.

Whereon my weary feet and famished heart
Whereon my wasted brain
Would of that carrion banquet make a part,
Would perish there full fain;
But we are goaded by some goad unblest
From such long-wished-for everlasting rest.

Songs in the Desert! Songs of husky breath,
And undivine Despair;
Songs that are dirges, but for Life not Death,
Songs that infect the air
Have sweetened bitterly my food and wine,
The heart corroded and the Dead Sea brine.

How strange! we can confront the direst grief
Erect, and scarcely quail,
If we can only have the poor relief
Of uttering our bale,
In music, sculpture, painting, verse or prose,
Who else were crushed beneath the heavy woes.

So potent is the Word, the Lord of Life,
And so tenacious Art,
Whose instinct urges to perpetual strife
With Death, Life's counterpart:
The magic of their music, might and light
Can keep one living in his own despite.

Their splendours cleave the deep sepulchral glooms,
Revive the ancient dead;
They build high palaces of lowly tombs
Wherein high lives are led;
Funereal black to royal purple glows,
And corpses stand up Kings from long repose.

And yet, my Love, I do not know a night
Since first you left me here,
I had not welcomed with serene delight
A Voice authentic, clear:
Go sleep, go sleep, thy long day's travail done;
Thou shalt not wake to see another sun.

Ah Love, my Love, with what perpetual moan,
While yet I half believed
That you were radiant by the Heavenly Throne,
From all Earth's pains retrieved,
My weak and selfish desolate heart did pine
To have you back here from the realm divine.

You would have kept me from the Desert sands
Bestrewn with bleaching bones,
And led me through the friendly fertile lands,
And changed my weary moans
To hymns of triumph and enraptured love,
And made our earth as rich as Heaven above.

But now, my only Love, when I must see
You are no more, no more;
As I and every living thing shall be
When pushed off from the shore
Of narrow Life into the Dead Sea waves,
Those never-satiate unsurrendering graves:

Now, when I see that we are all resolved
Into the Universe
Whence so mysteriously we were evolved;
That all our parts disperse
Never to build our very selves agen,
Though roses spring from roses, men from men:

Now, when I see that all our little race
Must have its death as birth;
Motes in infinities of Time and Space,
Less lasting than our Earth,
This many-insect-peopled drop of dew
Exhaling in a moment from the view:

Yea, now that I have learnt by grievous thought
Something of Life and Death;
And how the one is like the other, naught,
Except for painful breath;
And now that I have learnt with infinite toil
To know myself, involved in such a coil:

Why, if there were a living God indeed,
And I should hear His Voice:
" Her death shall be abolished for thy need,
That ye may both rejoice;
She shall come back as young as when she died
To thee as young, fit bridegroom for such bride:

And ye shall live together man and wife
Unto a reverend age;
And love shall be your balm in grief and strife
Whatever wars may rage;
And young ones fill your home with tender cheer
And keep your name green when yourselves are sere."

I would reply: " Lord of the Universe!
Pity and pardon now!
I shudder from this blessing as a curse;
Down to the dust I bow,
And from my inmost spirit supplicate
Thou wilt be pleased to alter not our fate.

For she has perfect and eternal rest,
She is not evermore,
Save as an image graven in my breast;
And I am near the shore
Of that Dead Sea where we find end of woes
Unconsciousness, oblivion, full repose.

I would not tear her from her resting place
For any human bliss;
I would not one of my past years retrace
Who seek the black abyss;
I would not have the burden on my soul
Of bringing babes into this world of dole."

Yes Love, my Love, dissolved so long ago,
Alive but in my heart,
It gives me solace now instead of woe,
Sweet joy instead of smart,
To brood and murmur in my desert bare:
She died so young, so tender, pure and fair.

And I have comfort that my own good time
Must now at length be near:
How Life is piteous, and how Death sublime!
O World of doubt and fear,
Of mystery, grief and yearning that appal,
Why were we ever brought to life at all?

What profit from all life that lives on Earth,
What good, what use, what aim?
What compensation for the throes of birth
And death in all its frame?
What conscious life has ever paid its cost?
From Nothingness to Nothingness — all lost!