Classic Poem

This empty little flask,
Unbroken by the weight of years,
The mold of sepulcher still clinging to its side,
Where it has lightly lain
In brittle pride,
Once brimmed hot tears:
Once held the sealed-up sobs of shattered dreams,
The salty dew of pain —
How like a jewel it gleams,
Mixed with the noon's frank gold again.

Where are those tears to-day,
That brine of grief?
Kind, conquering relief
Of stoic time tramping its stoic way!

I wonder so
How eyes that looked on death
Could weep those ordered funeral-tears,
The heart could guide its anguish how to flow
Toward the tear-bottle's brim,
Extended deftly there,
This mustered stream for her, for him,

This conserve of despair!
— " O love, O my lost love! Thrice-cursed gods!
O sweetest Alcibiades,
Never to see thee more!
Bring me, dear Phrynia, I beg,
Another bottle, please —
This one floods o'er! — "

What if the dole,
Mute protest of the soul,
Should prove too vast for tear benumbed to fall?
Did relatives declare,
— " She does not care!
" She does not mourn at all!
See now the bottle, filled but grudging-half — " ?
Had they no humor then, these Greeks,
Did no one laugh?

O bottled widow's woe,
Standing in ostentatious row
Within the gloom
Of dear departed's tomb!
Evaporated lover's grief!
All love is bitter-brief,
I know.

But in my breast,
Deep — deep —
I hear the beat of my tear-bottle,
Throbbing the tears I will not weep.

And when I die,
I think that it will lie
And crumble into calm, cool dust with me,
Dust of the long road leading to eternity,
Holding its lears unshed,
Still flowing for my dead.