Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By A Woman Sold; and Other Poems (1867). III. To and FroAugusta Webster (18401894)
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And sorrow lingers deep in laughing eyes,
Sad echoes tremble mid glad peals of mirth,
Low wailings whisper through rich melodies.
“I see his life, I know him very blest.”
For would he tell you of the canker woe
That preys upon his being unconfessed?
Of mirth and pastime and smiles flashed on all
There is no mimic weary of his face,
No actor longing for the curtain’s fall.
And chill their victims with a dull distress,
And, sighing through the measure’s clearest note,
Weird voices murmur, full of bitterness.
New sorrows rack them with hot spasm pain;
Who knows? The ball-room actors play their parts,
And we smile with them and discern no strain.
That men so sorrowing can cheat our sense”
Yet let him own when grief his soul has stirred
He has been merry with gay eloquence.
If he should say “Lo, I am very sad”
To idle hearers, though they heard his tale
And ceased a little moment to be glad?
Nor bares its wound to the chill general gaze;
Men laugh together … if they weep alone:
But sorrow walks in all the wide world’s ways.
Her freezing touch will seize you unawares.
Look on her, never grovel at her feet,
For he is hers for ever who despairs.
The stony smiler on the desert sand,
Smiling upon old pride’s long-cycled wane,
Smiling unchanged upon a saddened land.
She ever sees the tombs of buried kings,
She has not lost the quiet of her gaze
Looking a silence deep with solemn things.
She in eternal calm looks out above—
And who shall look upon a waste of woes
With such grand patience which no change may move?
And sunlight once more floods upon the plain.
Yet wait; the foolish leaf that flies the blast
Grows never greenly on the bough again.
Put forth your hand and draw her veil aside;
Behold, what secret of masked smiles she had,
What royal lovegifts in one cloked hand hide.
In which you sorrowed. Void is worse than pain.
And many a rich bloom grows because of tears;
And we see Heaven’s lights more when our lights wane.
And we, who see no more than we are shown
Of others’ hearts, can we so much as tell
If grief or joy be chiefest in our own?
Sunlight and shadow waver to and fro,
And sadness echoes in the voice of mirth,
And music murmurs through the wail of woe.