Classic Poem

When words were mine, I, then, the Heaven-protected,
Eagerly bent my brows and whispered low:
" Oh peerless friend! Oh Christ who lov'st me so!
Speak, shall I ever again death's odium know,
Now that by thee I have been resurrected? "

And he, as if his miracle repenting,
Cast down vague eyes and sadly murmured: " Yes! "
Then turned away his face in deep distress,
While I, dumbfounded and all wretchedness,
Spake no word more, but went my way lamenting.

*****

Gone was the dream magnificent I cherished
For one brief span, and dulled was the sublime
And senseless thought (perchance akin to crime)
That by his will I could exist all time,
While He upon the cross was doomed to perish.

Ah! Death in fearless ways makes no selection,
Alike are slain the reptile and the bird;
No power its arm has haughtily deferred,
And even the will of God is barely heard
By Death, the iconoclast of resurrection.

Now I pass on alone in grief religious,
Once having changed the universal law,
While men gaze on me in bewildered awe,
As one who saw that which none other saw,
As one who knows God's mysteries prodigious.

I wander desolate, shunning friendly faces;
I fill the halls at night with hollow cries;
I see each morn the mocking red sun rise,
That warns me one more day has come; mine eyes
Are white with weeping in all lonely places.

A shadow of man, inconsequent and aimless,
I keep my mighty secret unrevealed
To man, but I have told it to the field,
The trees, the stars, the stones, which will not yield
Its horror up, or tell its essence nameless.

Ah, Christ! if thou art watching o'er me haggard,
Pity and spare me through the coming years;
Compassion find for my incessant fears;
Remember thy past friendship and thy tears;
Bid Death the second time be dull and laggard.