dots-menu
×

Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  Yourself

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Yourself

By Jones Very (1813–1880)

[Born in Salem, Mass., 1813. Died there, 1880. From Poems, with a Memoir by William P. Andrews. 1883.]

’TIS to yourself I speak; you cannot know

Him whom I call in speaking such a one,

For you beneath the earth lie buried low,

Which he alone as living walks upon:

You may at times have heard him speak to you,

And often wished perchance that you were he;

And I must ever wish that it were true,

For then you could hold fellowship with me:

But now you hear us talk as strangers, met

Above the room wherein you lie abed;

A word perhaps loud spoken you may get,

Or hear our feet when heavily they tread;

But he who speaks, or him who’s spoken to,

Must both remain as strangers still to you.