O meek anticipant of that sure pain
Whose sureness gray-haired scholars hardly learn!
What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain?
What heavens, what earth, what suns, shalt thou discern?
Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star,
Match that funereal aspect with her pall,
I think thou wilt have fathomed life too far,
Have known too much—or else forgotten all.
The Guide of our dark steps, a triple veil
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps;
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.
Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labor's dull, Lethæan spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing;
And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may,
In the thronged fields where winning comes by strife;
And though the just sun gild, as mortals pray,
Some reaches of thy storm-vexed stream of life;
Though that blank sunshine blind thee; though the cloud
That severed the world's march and thine, be gone;
Though ease dulls grace, and wisdom be too proud
To halve a lodging that was all her own,—
Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern,
Oh, once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain!
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear this majesty of grief again.
