Classic Poem

I wrestled with the hight,
Then on the rocky, upland ridge found food.
Perhaps another week my breath may spend.
But my limbs falter; methinks they are swollen.
I heard my mother say death lay not far
When that began.
Death! All men fear to die!
To change, to be crushed out into the darkness,
Or sheeted off the scaffolding that swings
Across the deep, unfathomable gulf,
Where all we love and all we hate are dashed, —
No, no, not all! save to themselves, not all,
To such as dream. —
Her blood stains all my soul!
I did not pause; of her I never thought.
'T was all myself, accursed self; her frail
And delicate life I disregarded then.
Soothing, I did not heal her tender fears,
Caress her yielding smile, born of delight;
But rudely swept her faithful heart away.
You tell me Gordon struck me; said I flung
The dice foully, the cards were marked, he struck;
And what was that? One midnight of this life
Would clean wash out centuries of insult, —
Baffled by secret foes, nailed to the Cross,
Far happier than this slowly dropping rust
Curdling about my unprotected thoughts.

Oft, ere I sought these ebon shades, I went
In villages as twilight took their streets,
And saw the laborer halting to his home,
His long day's toil misfigured in the glebe,
And heard his children cry their father's name.

Might I not, too, have had a home, a life ,
My children's love? Yes! ere these viler fiends
Than all hell's lowest pit supplies, despoiled
My home, murdered my wife, kidnapped my darlings,
Children, — all, flung into one common grave;
And I to weep and see them till I die!
That sound again! Was it the breath of moonlit air?
" Eliot! it might have been, " I list it still;
" But might is not , in some men's decalogue.
Mark how the noon of night silvers yon spray,
That tears the crashing cataract in twain,
Then 'mid the dim ravines crushed to wild flakes,
And ever writhing, hurled on heaven again!
See, in the vale beneath, the placid pool
Wherein the tall trees muse and view themselves,

Narcissus like, built in supremer grace
E'en than their own, Nature's prevailing portraits,
The which she draws to emulate her skill.
Eliot! they never change. The whirlpool roars;
The tender, silent rivulet pursues
The even tenor of its noiseless way;
Down, down forever smites the tortured fall,
Its broken agony on life's last beat!
But mark, the stroke of twelve. Dear love, farewell! "
Her voice? Was it a voice? How my heart beats!
I thought I heard a voice! My veins are chill.
Twelve did it say? Who knows the hour of twelve
Here in this solitude, where never fell
The solemn music of the churchyard tower;
Here in this fiendish cave, the wild man's lair,

The moniac's cell? Why, I could rend my heart
From out my breast, and crush it 'neath my feet!
But I am doomed to live, my own revenge,
And Gordon's death must feast upon my blood.
That voice again! Eliza's? I did dream!
Yet in these dreams of life I meet with death.
I live when I am dead, when life is gone;
And when I wake, I die!
My limbs are cold;
I feel the frost, — 't is stealing near my heart.
More wood upon the fire; but no! Who's here, —
Here in my seat? And on the table, — What?
" All false cards, marked, you say, and loaded dice?
Well, well, 't is much for you to say to me, —
Eliot, that never bent to mortal man. "

" Yes, loaded all, false, cheating; 't is your trade.
Take that. " A blow, a blow! Why, what is this?
'T is the cold firelight mocking at the stones;
They did not hear. My limbs are freezing now,
I 'll build the fire. " Rifles, to-morrow,
At twenty paces! Eliza will be there. "
'T is Gordon's voice, or yet one other dream.

I cannot love such nights; never I may.
Their spirit is a poison to my sense,
And most of them, I fear the moonlight's spell.
What does it comfort? Not my breaking heart.
No shrub or flower profits its palsied glare.
Silence and gliding phantoms fill the woods,
And the dim forest glimmers with affright, —
Less like the human life I thought to live
Than all things else, and more like him I hate.
Myself I mean, most hated of my race!
I must endure it; but when I was young
Then moodish patience was to me a charm.
He who is patient lacks no more; he 's passed
The precipice; aloft he does not hang
Over the dizzy, threatening gulf, but glides
In peaceful currents down the greensward vale.
The night wears on. The fire has sought my limbs;
Would it could burn this heart, beyond all warmth
That mortal lips can blow into a flame.
I 'll seek my bed again. —
I loved but once.
He who loves twice has never loved that once;
Like coldly torpid hearts that slowly drag
(A long paralysis from birth to death),
Their small expedient selves. All else to them.
Save their own earnest cant, is rottenness,
Feeling some whim; sorrow a lie, so wise
And temperate their cherished self-esteem;
And they succeed in all, and blazon forth
Most godlike, in the senate halls, in law,
In camps, in literature prevailing.
I was not of them; yet I sought the seats
Where eloquence should rule, and might have played,
Had I not fallen, myself the canting knave.
Was it not better thus to fall and fade.
To all things human, than to live and lie?
I know not. What an endless night! Sleep, sleep
Deserts me! Once I loved to muse and think, —
Live o'er the happy hours of past delight;
Think of that creature folded in my heart,
As I in hers; and mark the long night build
Its Spaniard's castle on a dreamer's brain.

Why, 't was a kind of rarer sleep; and when
The glorious morning broke my waking dream,
I did not feel the want, but flung abroad
As light as any bird. 'T is strangely wronged;
Confusion follows swift these sleepless nights,
When nothing goes to cheat me of the loss
That drains my waking hours, nothing to part,
No veil, no dark concealment from those shapes.
Oh, I would die within some happy dream;
I cannot wish to pass and feel the steel
Stirring in my cold heart with its last beat.
But I shall die, as I do live, alone;
This solitude detains no human guests;
No reverend father, with his beads in hand,
Or prayer from trembling lips, or mother's tears,
Or the soft heads of children o'er their sire, —
All's dark and dumb and chilled.
Daylight! So dark?
The notes of early birds! I must have dreamed.
Have then the sands of night dashed off the hours
In a swift torrent, night that is my prayer?
For then I part forget my outlaw's watch;
Or, if remembered, there hangs o'er the veil, —
That gauzy, thin oblivion men name sleep, —
A breathless falsehood, intermixed among
That which we are, yet are not. Never yet
Since I first faced these woods has the midnight
Found me consoled by this false opiate;
Never the morning light has blotted out,
From off this crime-worn soul, its weight of woe.
Let fate be thanked, 't is not Eliza's soul!
She died, she went to peace; she sleeps the sleep
That should forever soothe her contrite thought.

Bless Heaven! it is not hers the frenzy eats,
The solitude devours, its sweetest prey
Some human heart!
Why should I save those letters?
A moment in that blaze, safely consumed;
And the rude scribbling of this traitorous pen,
Were it not handsomer, with them to the dust,
As I shall fall myself? What interest,
What word of good have they for mortal ear?
But these red stains, — these will not let me burn them.
Between their life and mine there stands a wall,
Fatality, that says: " Live! These shall live,
Even as you shall live, cursed, ever cursed,
Fate's brand across your deeds. "