Laments

Excerpt

LAMENT I

Come, Heraclitus and Simonides,
Come with your weeping and sad elegies:
Ye griefs and sorrows, come from all the lands
Wherein ye sigh and wail and wring your hands:
Gather ye here within my house today
And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May
Ungodly Death hath ta'en to his estate,
Leaving me on a sudden desolate.
'Tis so a serpent glides on some shy nest
And, of the tiny nightingales possessed,
Doth glut its throat, though, frenzied with her fear,
The mother bird doth beat and twitter near
And strike the monster, till it turns and gapes
To swallow her, and she but just escapes.
"'Tis vain to weep," my friends perchance will say.
Dear God, is aught in life not vain, then? Nay,
Seek to lie soft, yet thorns will prickly be:
The life of man is naught but vanity.
Ah, which were better, then—to seek relief
In tears, or sternly strive to conquer grief?

If I had ever thought to write in praise
Of little children and their simple ways,
Far rather had I fashioned cradle verse
To rock to slumber, or the songs a nurse
Might croon above the baby on her breast.
Setting her charge's short-lived woes at rest.
For much more useful are such trifling tasks
Than that which sad misfortune this day asks:
To weep o'er thy deaf grave, dear maiden mine.
And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine.
But now I have no choice of subject: then
I shunned a theme scarce fitting riper men,
And now disaster drives me on by force
To songs unheeded by the great concourse
Of mortals. Verses that I would not sing
The living, to the dead I needs must bring.
Yet though I dry the marrow from my bones,
Weeping another's death, my grief atones
No whit. All forms of human doom
Arouse but transient thoughts of joy or gloom.
O law unjust, O grimmest of all maids,
Inexorable princess of the shades!
For, Ursula, thou hadst but tasted time
And art departed long before thy prime.
Thou hardly knewest that the sun was bright
Ere thou didst vanish to the halls of night.
I would thou hadst not lived that little breath—
What didst thou know, but only birth, then death?
And all the joy a loving child should bring
Her parents, is become their bitterest sting.

LAMENT III

So, thou hast scorned me, my delight and heir;
Thy father's halls, then, were not broad and fair
Enough for thee to dwell here longer, sweet.
True, there was nothing, nothing in them meet
For thy swift-budding reason, that foretold
Virtues the future years would yet unfold.
Thy words, thy archness, every turn and bow—
How sick at heart without them am I now!
Nay, little comfort, never more shall I
Behold thee and thy darling drollery.
What may I do but only follow on
Along the path where earlier thou hast gone.
And at its end do thou, with all thy charms,
Cast round thy father's neck thy tender arms.

Thou hast constrained mine eyes, unholy Death,
To watch my dear child breathe her dying breath:
To watch thee shake the fruit unripe and clinging
While fear and grief her parents' hearts were wringing.
Ah, never, never could my well-loved child
Have died and left her father reconciled:
Never but with a heart like heavy lead
Could I have watched her go, abandonèd.
And yet at no time could her death have brought
More cruel ache than now, nor bitterer thought;
For had God granted to her ample days
I might have walked with her down flowered ways
And left this life at last, content, descending
To realms of dark Persephone, the all-ending,
Without such grievous sorrow in my heart,
Of which earth holdeth not the counterpart.
I marvel not that Niobe, alone
Amid her dear, dead children, turned to stone.

LAMENT V

Just as a little olive offshoot grows
Beneath its orchard elders' shady rows,
No budding leaf as yet, no branching limb,
Only a rod uprising, virgin-slim—
Then if the busy gardener, weeding out
Sharp thorns and nettles, cuts the little sprout,
It fades and, losing all its living hue,
Drops by the mother from whose roots it grew:
So was it with my Ursula, my dear;
A little space she grew beside us here,
Then Death came, breathing pestilence, and she
Fell, stricken lifeless, by her parent tree....