Classic Poem

I


A WOMAN OF SIXTY

THE shock came when I went up to her coffin
And looked upon her satin-pillowed face.
I had known her long,
But of soul had never seen in her a trace.
Her life had been a bitterness and a malice,
A venom against all visions of the spirit.
Beauty, I knew, had never touched her mind,
And nothing akin to beauty had come near it.
A cackling laugh that said all swans were geese,
A bigot sneer that slandered every fineness,
A jealousy that jaundiced her—because
Her being was ever devoid of all divineness.
Loving none but the offspring of her body,
And wanting to suckle them beyond due time,
The bliss of her infatuate motherhood
Seemed hardly more than sentimental slime.
Obsessed with a desire for domination,
That shaped her mouth to fish-like egotism,
Her tongue clacked with inanities that rent
Faith in her virtues with distaste and schism.
All this and more I had seen. But now strange death
That takes the soul, had done a stranger thing;
It had given a soul to her—endowed her brow
And lips and lids beyond imagining.
For calmness sat where bitterness had been,
And silence where coarse cackling laughter carked.
And where the snarling sneer had nostriled her
Eternity—and majesty—were marked.
And jealousy no longer jaundiced her;
For who is jealous of the Infinite?
Sublimity enswathed her like a dream;
On her divinity was deeply writ.
And now her motherhood was only Nature's,
Within whose womb she soon again would lie.
Her self was selfless—and its littleness
Was great with all the peace of those who die.
Therefore my shock, as leaning over the coffin
I looked upon her satin-pillowed face.
All that had been unlovely had to all
That might have been immortal given place.

II

A SELF-SERVER

SUCH was his greed of life and dread of the voidness of the tomb,
That he bade us bury a clock with him in the grave's gloom;
A clock that would run a year and a day, after his heart stopped.
Open the coffin. … Look. He listens to it, with lids dropped.

Look at his brow. It is so still he will be sure to hear
As he turns to dust the strange tick of an unallotted year.
He ever wanted more than his share of everything, and so
Has taken a year of time with him, after his time to go.

Look at his face, so callous and contemptuous of worth,
So earthy that it is strange he dreaded at last the still earth.
Forgetful of all soul-things he has gone to the soul's clime,
And has taken with him only the pale posthumous tick of time.

III

THE DIVORCEE

I KNEW that her face would look just as it does.
Death has not chiselled a wonder of it away,
Rather each line seems given the power to stay
Just as it was—by merciful delusion
That comes before decay.
Her lips are a little withered, it is true—
As lips must be when with all wanting through—
And her eyes are leaden now under her lids;
No glance of them for adoration bids.
Strange that it should be so, for the first time!
And stranger that the lure of her is gone.
None would believe, seeing chaste silence on
Her brow, that naked thoughts once ran in her brain
With a wild and bold and bacchanal disdain
Of chastity—after she failed to gain
In marriage the mated love of which she was fain.
For, spite of all, she was the kind of woman
Who loves but one man, be he god or devil,
And her husband could have led her to any revel,
Of Heaven or Hell,
Had he not left her—as was merely human—
Revolted by an amorousness that clung to him
Cloying, or that resentful flung to him
Reminders of the adorers who desired her—
Left her and sought another with cool hands
And quiet lips, whose kiss made no demands.
And so as she lies thus tranquilly at last,
With calm hands cooler than that other wife's,
You must know all the sad and desperate strifes
She drowned in drugged oblivion ere she passed,
To know that the look which lingers on her face
Is unawareness that the infinite change
From time to eternity has taken place.
She is her frozen self, ignorant still
Of Life's or Dissolution's ultimate will,
And only the lily-pall on her seems strange.

IV

AN IDEALIST

LAST night I left him very ill,
Cover his face; it is too still,
It is too cold and stark.
These were the words I read in his eyes
As he turned toward the Dark:

The winds of death blow all lights out,
As a man goes to the tomb,
Save the one candle light of faith
That flickers in the gloom.
His mind gutters and smokes in his brain,
And desire's flame fades out,
But always there is one faint beam
Throwing before him a brave gleam,
And denying life is only a dream
Wrought by an atom-rout.

These were his words. Cover his face;
Soul from it has gone.
Light a candle in its place:
He fares farther on.