Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Miscellaneous Poems. VI. Lines of LifeLætitia Elizabeth Maclean (18021838)
W
Too strictly school’d are they,
One secret of my soul to show,
One hidden thought betray.
Look’d freely from my brow;
It once was check’d by timidness,
’Tis taught by caution now.
And I must seem like them
And such I am, for I am false
As those I most condemn.
My tongue its softest tone;
I borrow others’ likeness, till
Almost I lose my own.
Whatever I would say;
In social life, all, like the blind,
Must learn to feel their way.
That struggle with the rein;
I bid my feelings sleep, like wrecks
In the unfathom’d main.
The true, and mock the name;
Mock at all high and early truth,
And I too do the same.
I swallow down the tear;
I hear them name some generous deed,
And I have learnt to sneer.
The pure, but named in mirth;
Till all of good, ay, even hope,
Seems exiled from our earth.
Is all that I can dread;
A sword hung by a single hair
For ever o’er the head.
In a most servile fear;
While none among us dares to say
What none will choose to hear.
In weakness they are gone;
And indolence and vanity
Rivet our fetters on.
I feel a loftier mood
Of generous impulse, high resolve,
Steal o’er my solitude!
That fill the midnight sky;
And wish, so passionately wish,
A light like theirs on high.
To benefit my kind;
And feel as if immortal power
Were given to my mind.
The sun of earthly gloom,
Which makes the gloriousness of death,
The future of the tomb—
Of a more heavenly one;
—A step, a word, a voice, a look,—
Alas! my dream is done!
Again is on my soul;
And I am but a nameless part
Of a most worthless whole.
Towards the future springs,
That future where it loves to soar
On more than eagle wings.
In that eternal time,
In which my lost hopes find a home,
My spirit knows its clime.
The worthless and the weak,
Whose every thought of self should raise
A blush to burn my cheek.
And made my heart a shrine
For what, although alloy’d, debased,
Is in itself divine.
Amid life’s weary chain;
But I have spoken hallow’d words,
Oh do not say in vain!
Say will my charmed chords
Wake to the morning light of fame,
And breathe again my words?
Alone in moonlight shine—
Tears for the absent and the loved—
Murmur some song of mine?
Himself a dying flame,
From many an antique scroll beside,
Choose that which bears my name?
The silence of the dead;
I care not, so my spirit last
Long after life has fled.