Poems (Greenwood)/The story of a life

by Grace Greenwood

THE STORY OF A LIFE.

The world smiled on me at my birth,—
 Beneath a rose-hued sky,
Rocked on the summer waves of love,
 My childhood glided by.

My boyhood passed in lofty dreams,
 In longings for the strife,
The glory, and the pageantry,
 The tournament of life.

At manhood's age, a being proud
 And passionate, I stood;
Gold, lands, were mine, and through my veins
 Went leaping princely blood.

Then Pleasure held her goblet high,
 And called on me to drain
The glowing wine quaffed by the gods,
 Till madness fired my brain;

She mocked and tortured by delay,—
 Then, at my frenzied call,
She offered to my burning lip
 The cup, and it was gall.

I won a friend by generous deeds,—
 One with an open brow;
He bound his very life to mine
 With many a holy vow.

Then fell the bolt,—I was betrayed!
 By cool, insidious art,—
By words that, like barbed arrows, still
 Are quivering in my heart.

At last unto my bosom came,
 In gentlest guise, young Love;
It crept into its resting-place,
 A sweet and quiet dove.

I warmed it in my inmost heart,
 Closed from the world's chill air;—
O, 't was a rapture caught from heaven
 To feel it nestling there!

But ah! one morn, from visions blest,
 I wakened with a moan;
There was a vulture at my breast,
 And that young dove had flown!

Then Fame held forth her laurel crown,
 From her proud height afar;
I longed for it, as does a child
 At evening for a, star.

I toiled, I suffered,—humble joys
 I careless flung aside,
Saw peace take wing, and in the dust
 Bow down my manly pride.

At last, at last, it bound my brow,
 That green immortal wreath!
Exulting, glorying, I stood,
 Defying time and death!

Yet soon I would have given worlds
 To fling it off again,
For thorns were hid among the leaves,
 That pierced me to the brain!

Now is my life a storm-wrecked bark,
 Dashed by time's surges high
Upon a bare, cold island rock,
 Beneath a northern sky.

There, in that realm where hearts congeal,
 The spirit's frozen zone,
A joyless, cheerless, loveless age,
 I stand alone,—alone.