Classic Poem

Scene — A female sitting by a bed-side, anxiously looking at the face of her husband, just dead. The soul within the dead body soliloquizes .
What change is this! What joy! What depth of rest!
What suddenness of withdrawal from all pain
Into all bliss? into a balm so perfect
I do not even smile! I tried but now,
With that breath's end, to speak to the dear face
That watches me—and lo! all in an instant,
Instead of toil, and a weak, weltering tear,
I am all peace, all happiness, all power,
Laid on some throne in space.—Great God! I am dead.
 ( A pause .) Dear God! thy love is perfect; thy truth known.
 ( Another .) And he,—and they!—How simple and strange! How beautiful!
But I may whisper it not,—even to thought;
Lest strong imagination, hearing it,
Speak, and the world be shattered.
 ( Soul again pauses .) O balm! O bliss! O saturating smile
Unsmiling! O doubt ended! certainty
Begun! O will, faultless, yet all indulged,
Encouraged to be wilful;—to delay
Even its wings for heav'n; and thus to rest
Here, here, ev'n here,—'twixt heav'n and earth awhile,
A-bed in the morn of endless happiness.

 I feel warm drops falling upon my face:
They reach me through the rapture of this cold.—
My wife! my love!—'tis for the best thou canst not
Know how I know thee weeping, and how fond
A kiss meets thine in these unowning lips.
Ah, truly was my love what thou didst hope it,
And more; and so was thine—I read it all—
And our small feuds were but impatiences
At seeing the dear truth ill understood.
Poor sweet! thou blamest now thyself, and heapest
Memory on memory of imagined wrong,
As I should have done too,—as all who love;
And yet I cannot pity thee:—so well
I know the end, and how thou'lt smile hereafter.

 She speaks my name at last, as though she feared
The terrible, familiar sound; and sinks
In sobs upon my bosom. Hold me fast,
Hold me fast, sweet, and from the extreme grow calm.—
Me, cruelly unmoved, and yet how loving!

 How wrong I was to quarrel with poor James!
And how dear Francis mistook me ! That pride,
How without ground it was! Those arguments,
Which I supposed so final, oh how foolish!
Yet gentlest Death will not permit rebuke,
Ev'n of one's self. They'll know all, as I know,
When they lie thus.
Colder I grow, and happier.
Warmness and sense are drawing to a point,
Ere they depart;—myself quitting myself.
The soul gathers its wings upon the edge
Of the new world, yet how assuredly!
Oh! how in balm I change! actively willed,
Yet passive, quite; and feeling opposites mingle
In exquisitest peace!—Those fleshly clothes,
Which late I thought myself, lie more and more
Apart from this warm, sweet, retreating me,
Who am as a hand withdrawing from a glove.

 So lay my mother: so my father: so
My children: yet I pitied them. I wept,
And fancied them in graves, and called them ‘poor!’

 O graves! O tears! O knowledge, will, and time,
And fear, and hope! what petty terms of earth
Were ye! yet how I love ye as of earth,
The planet's household words; and how postpone,
Till out of these dear arms, th' immeasurable
Tongue of the all-possessing smile eternal!
Ah, not excluding these, nor aught that 's past,
Nor aught that 's present, nor that's yet to come,
Well waited for. I would not stir a finger
Out of this rest, to reassure all anguish;
Such warrant hath it; such divine conjuncture;
Such a charm binds it with the needs of bliss.

 That was my eldest boy's—that kiss. And that
The baby with its little unweening mouth;
And those—and those—Dear hearts! they have all come,
And think me dead—me, who so know I'm living,
The vitalest creature in this fleshly room.
I part; and with my spirit's eyes, full opened,
Will look upon them.
Patient be those tears,
Fresh heart-dews, standing on these dear clay-moulds
Of souls made of myself,—made of us both
In the half-heavenly time. I quit ye but
To meet again, and will revisit soon
In many a dream, and many a gentle sigh.
And was that me?—that hollow-cheeked pale thing,
Shattered with passions, worn with cares; now placid
With my divine departure? And must love
Think of thee painfully? of stifling boards
'Gainst the free face, and of the irreverent worm?
To dust with thee, poor corpse! to dust and grass,
And the glad innocent worm, that does its duty
As thou dost thine in changing. I thy life,
Life of thy life, bird of the bird, ah ha!
Turn my face forth to heav'n—ah ha! ah ha!
Oh the infinitude and the eternity!
The dimpled air! the measureless conscious heaven!
The endless possession! the sweet, mad, fawning planets
Sleeking, like necks, round the beatitudes of the ubiquitous sun-god
With bee-music of innumerable organ thunders.
And the travelling crowds this way, like a life-tempest,
With rapid angelical faces, two in one,
Ah ah! ah ha! and the stillness beyond the stars—
My Friend! my Mother!—I mingle through the roar.