C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Pain in Autumn
By Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903)
A
Preys on my heart, and clouds my brain;
And shadows brood above my dreams,
Like spectral mists o’er haunted streams.
The room is cold and desolate,
And dampness on the window-panes
Foretells the equinoctial rains.
The stony road runs past the door,
Dry and dusty evermore;
Up and down the people go,
Shadowy figures, sad and slow,
And the strange houses lie below.
Ranged in a row before the gate,
Giving their voices to the wind,
And their sorrows to my mind.
Behind the house the river flows,
Half unrest and half repose:
Ships lie below with mildewed sails,
Tattered in forgotten gales;
Along each hulk a whitish line,
The dashing of the ancient brine.
Beyond, the spaces of the sea,
Which old Ocean’s portals be:
The land runs out its horns of sand,
And the sea comes in to meet the land.
Till they meet, and mock the eye,
And where they meet the sand-hills lie;
No cattle in their pastures seen,
For the yellow grass was never green.
With a calm and solemn stare
They look to heaven in blank despair,
And heaven, with pity dumb the while,
Looks down again with a sickly smile.
Swimming in dim, uncertain light,
Something between the day and night.
And the winds blow, but soft and low,
Unheard, unheeded in their woe;
Like some sick heart, too near o’erthrown
To vent its grief by sigh or moan,
Some heart that breaks, like mine—alone.
And be, what all these phantoms be,
Within this realm of penal pain,
Beside the melancholy main:
The waste which lies, as legend saith,
Between the worlds of Life and Death;
A soul from Life to Death betrayed,
A shadow in the world of shade.