James and Mary Ford, eds. Every Day in the Year. 1902.
September 15Arthur Henry Hallam
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (18091892)
T
The darken’d heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
And hush’d my deepest grief of all,
When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
The heart that never plighted troth,
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
I felt it when I sorrowed most,
’Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all—