Classic Poem

IV

No, no, 't is very much too late.
I thought it mockery that you said
You loved me; but a certain fate
Lowers your voice and bows your head.
I tell you, you desire to wake the dead.

'T is pitiful so to drag out
The sorry quarrel in our souls,
Till even the blood suspends in doubt
And each full impulse backward rolls.
Meantime the hour regardless passing tolls.

Yes! think how year on year is gone.
You went your way and hummed your dreams
Of passion and oblivion
In lands where terrible sunbeams
Shiver upon the leaping arch of streams.

Your heart was violent and you stretched
Tiptoe after the stars your hand! —
'T was but a willow-bough you fetched.
The argosies of your command
Returned, saying beyond there was no land.

You cursed the woman's life for lame.
To do! you cried, and labouring
Like men bring in the distant aim! —
What was this aim you needs must bring,
Your one, your altogether desired thing?

You knew not, doubting day by day.
Like yours how many lives are lived!
How seldom all is given away,
How little of every gift received!
How the heart most of all is least believed!

When at your going my grief was new
And the long future all to waste,
I said farewell to more than you:
I wandered up into the Past
And wandering have imagined peace at last.

Still, perhaps, under leaves that lie
You'd feel the roots of sorrow end
Here in my bosom dyingly:
Mere threads they are, too frail to tend!
I've done with my own living, O my friend!

For what were gained if I were yours?
Fever and frenzy of the blood,
The pleasure which no surfeit cures,
Endless desire, hunger, feud —
And, at the end of passion, solitude. —

You know how, born by a small hearth,
While out in the sad dark it snows
And 't is for months an unseen earth,
The soul as by remembrance goes
After the warm vineyard and burning rose,

To live long years by stream and hill
Within the southern light, with men
Who speak delicious language: — till
The pain of being alien
Urges one elsewhere yet not home again.

So are our lives. I love you more.
But other hearts by destiny
Must needs possess what they adore
And have it, to live with and to die,
To strangle or soothe with kisses. Not so I.

By silences within a dream
And bird-songs of a spring sunrise,
To the onward measure of a stream
Nearer the sea where quiet is,
I love you more, much more, but otherwise.

If I have wronged you in the days
Bygone but unforgotten now,
I make no pleading for your grace.
My tongue is bitter. Leave me, go.

You have no pity, none. You live
Impatient and unreconciled.
Nay, were you a mother, I believe
You never could well love your child.

You've cracked the sense of life and death
With passions in you that despise
The thing you love and choke its breath,
Till unrecriminate it dies, —

It dies to you; and nothing then,
Nor art nor hope nor force nor spell
Can worry back the lost again, —
Lost, lost, and irrecoverable.

And then, God knows, some things there be
Where never pardon yet was known:
What words have leapt from you to me!
Enough, henceforward I'm my own.

Yes, men are selfish — Tell me, you
Who pluck my thoughts for flying fast,
Ask all the years to be, and rue
The unalterably separate past,

What is this that is generous?
Can just a word we used to know
In childhood, commonly, to us
Have grown a vulgar riddle so?

Sometimes I think we never met,
Such immense walls of iron and ice
Between us infinitely set
Spring blind into the spirit's skies.

Sometimes I think we never met, —
'T had surely better been, to spare
This nervous wringing of regret,
This hope that tightens to despair.

We have not understood, for all
We deeply lived and clearly said.
And without knowledge love must fall, —
Like this of ours, that lying dead

Clamours for burial. It is time,
It was time in much earlier days,
Before we soiled our lips with crime,
That you and I went our two ways.