DESPAIR
DEAR, when you see my grave,
37 lines
Hand me my light gloves, James;
I'm off for the waltzing world,
36 lines
The mothers wish for no more daughters;
There is no future before them.
18 lines
A broken mirror in a trembling hand;
Sad, trembling lips that utter broken thought:
12 lines
Pray, have you heard the news?
Sturdy in lungs and thews,
18 lines
We all have hearts that shake alike
Beneath the arias of Fate's hand;
12 lines
Art One is so fair, I turn to go,
52 lines
We see the sky,--we love it day by day;
We feel the wind of Spring, from blossoms winging;
8 lines, 1 comment
We speak of the world that passes away,--
The world of men who lived years ago,
12 lines
At purple eyes beside the grain,
Our loves on altars we had burned,
16 lines
Labor not in the murky dell,
But till your harvest hill at morn;
8 lines
Eileen of four,
Eileen of smiles;
20 lines
Come, brothers, let us sing a dirge,--
A dirge for myriad chances dead;
24 lines
[Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1864]
25 lines
Why is the nameless sorrowing look
So often thought a whim?
20 lines
To his heart it struck such terror
That he laughed a laugh of scorn,--
20 lines
Say not, sad bell, another hour hath come,
Bare for the record of a world of crime;
8 lines
Paler than the water's white
Stood the maiden in the shade,
12 lines
Take me away into a storm of snow
So white and soft, I feel no deathly chill,
12 lines
Twenty bold mariners went to the wave,
Twenty sweet breezes blew over the main;
12 lines
Dear little Dorothy, she is no more!
I have wandered world-wide, from shore to shore,
8 lines
Weeping for another's woe,
Tears flow then that would not flow
14 lines
Somewhere, somewhere in this heart
There lies a jewel from the sea,
12 lines
I loved a child as we should love
Each other everywhere;
28 lines
Touch gently, friend, and slow, the violin, So sweet and low,
That my dreaming senses may be beckoned so
14 lines
The world was like a shell to me,--
Its voice with distant song was low;
12 lines
There in the midst of gloom the church-spire rose,
And not a star lit any side of heaven;
16 lines
Gray towers make me think of thee,
Thou girl of olden minstrelsy,
24 lines
The sanctity that is about the dead
To make us love them more than late, when here,
13 lines
O soul of life, 't is thee we long to hear,
Thine eyes we seek for, and thy touch we dream;
6 lines
|