Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Songs in Minor Keys (1884). III. Thou Too Hast SufferedChristina Catherine Fraser-Tytler (Mrs. Edward Liddell) (1848 )
W
Comes the dear thought when I am spent with pain,
When the slow hours are passing, thought recalls
Thine agony again.
Complaining sore I turn rebellious still,
As if Thou also hadst not been downcast
By Cedron’s rill.
Looking around on places death makes void,
Can I forget that Thou didst lose Thy friend,
That Lazarus died?
I lose my friend in God, and say ’tis well;
But to know him, all-trusting, all-betrayed,
Is sorrow’s hell!
By shallow faithless heart, too false to see,
Full of poor joys, and meaner aims and ends,
Its matchless purity.
This fills my cup; hast Thou too suffered this;
Ay more, denied by Thy first friend, and mocked
By Judas’ kiss!
I turn from what I bear to what may be
The little place where Thou wouldst have me work
Awhile for Thee.
Since Thou all this hast suffered more than I;
But the deaf ear that will not heed Thy word,
’Gainst this I cry!
A dull dead world of sense looks blindly out,
While holy things, that stir high souls, are spent
On souls that flout.
Ah, senseless I, forgetting that fair spot
Thou fain hadst gathered to Thy kingly-breast,
But she “would not.”
That saw Thee, knew Thy works, yet feared Thy power,
And with mad voice lift up the prayer that drove
Thee forth that hour.
One only load is mine Thou couldst not bear,
The burden of a soul so all-unclean,
My sin’s despair.
For not my greed and not my guilt alone,
But all the awful burden of all sin
Is still Thine own.
My own dark heart makes dark the world to me;
What is the awful vista of all time,
My Lord, to Thee?