Classic Poem

It is not sad, or I would laugh.
Instead, seeming to laugh with you,
I cry, alone—'tis afterwards.
Alone, no handkerchief.
I seem, I seemed, to laugh with you,
To be a chair in which she sat
As wasteful friends among themselves,
Not growing dearer than they were.

It is not sad, or I would laugh,
Thinking apart how you addressed
A chair not empty, yet not myself.
Instead I cry, because I do not cry.
Alone peculiarly
From having sat with you, and not,
I feel a grieflessness, a grief.

If there is weather still behind unspent,
I shall still feel it when it breaks,
And tell the changes between hot and cold
As if the slow death were my own:
Weather is the dead at the hard school.
But if it's love again, more love,
Here's no commitment to your sense.
More love's not ignorance:
It is to reason life against
Death in the understanding hailed.

And well you know that life is done.
Yet you will not know, you sit
Like dreamers in a closed café
At their next cups—
‘Until the others go.’
Death is a wisdom left at home,
A book to recommend. But who the author,
And what the title? You can't remember.
Meanwhile at any table there's any woman:
That's also death, her mind elsewhere,
Here letting love make time
Out of her slow long ‘Day is done’—
So long, so long, there's night yet.

But any woman soon goes home
And won't be back to-morrow night.
Death is this morning now,
Except where weather pleads another day
For the clumsy elements, or a year,
To learn the human lesson in.

In the same chairs you sit talking,
At the same hour—and of me
A fondness as of none absent
Fills your ears. But never did I sit so.
I cry with those supposed eyes mine,
And it is not sad, or I would laugh
In mourning of once having laughed,
Sitting with you in laughing death-talk.
But you had not death in your hearts,
More love only: a backwardness to keep
Knowledge beyond the time of knowing—
Until too late, too late always.

Goodbye, I cannot bring you closer
If you prefer the dying way,
Dwelling the living side of death.
Not me you sat with, but a pathos,
My partial image torn out of me.
Nor ever did you have me whole.
You courted a patched presence, her and her.

Now I am whole, now I have gone.
But fear not: if you suffer of it,
You cannot know—pleasure and pain
Vanished with understanding when
You knew and of this more of mind
Made more of love, more lingering.
Goodbye, we have both forgotten.
That garbled sweetness of our discourse
Was but the mist largening
Between us of occasion lost.

And therefore do I go off crying,
Since it is not sad, or I would sadly
Make to laugh, remembering laughing—
Instead of with these tears forgetting.
I spare you further courtesies
Of cup and table, chair and conversation.
And get you off, an opposite way,
Riding against the heathen, death,
Into a Christian heaven where
Safe lie the individual graves
From death's outlandish unioning.

And it is not sad:
No graves divide here the single scene
On which my tears fall as rain
Might upon nowhere spill, from nowhere,
To prove the meaning natural,
Unsudden fast succeeding
Of the familiar by the forgotten—
To prove me any woman once,
Whose human griefs now gathered in
Compose a heart as then, a sadness of
Nothing to weep, no one to laugh with
Of having laughed once with of weeping.