At purple eyes beside the grain,
Our loves on altars we had burned,
And mixed our tribute with the dew,
Our tears, when rosy dawn returned.
Our voices we had joined with song
Of bird ecstatic, light, and free;
Our laughter rollicked with the brook
Running through darkness merrily.
At purple eyes beside the rim
Of frozen lakes our loves we burned,
And slid away when stillness reigned:
Deep the vast woods our bodies urned.
In starlit night along the shade
Of our dusk tombs our spirits glide;
We hear the echoing of the wind,
We breathe the sighs we living sighed.
LIFE'S BURYING-GROUND.
My graveyard holds no once-loved human forms,
Grown hideous and forgotten, left alone,
But every agony my heart has known,--
The new-born trusts that died, the drift of storms.
I visit every day the shadowy grove;
I bury there my outraged tender thought;
I bring the insult for the love I sought,
And my contempt, where I had tried to love.
BEYOND UTTERANCE.
There in the midst of gloom the church-spire rose,
And not a star lit any side of heaven;
In glades not far the damp reeds coldly touched
Their sides, like soldiers dead before they fall;
There in the belfry clung the sleeping bat,--
Most abject creature, hanging like a leaf
Down from the bell-tongue, silent as the speech
The dead have lost ere they are laid in graves.
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