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Home  »  American Sonnets  »  Oscar Fay Adams (1855–1919)

Higginson and Bigelow, comps. American Sonnets. 1891.

Indifference

Oscar Fay Adams (1855–1919)

WHAT is indifference, do you ask of me?

O well I know the meaning of the phrase.

It is to find gray ash instead of blaze

That warmed you once; to lose, alas! the key

Which turned in friendship’s wards; to sometime see

The eyes that shone for you in other days

Now coldly meet your own in passing gaze;

To know that what has been no more shall be.

It is to find that you in naught believe,

To know that youth has fled far down the past,

To feel that hope will ne’er again be born,

And love is but a poor worn cheat at last.

It is all this, yet not for this to grieve,

To live, and heed not that one lives forlorn!