WELTSCHMERZ.
I.
Birds in the night
Thrilled my heart with their warning
Of woe;
Birds in the morning
Clamoured in choir, till the sun was in sight,
High and low,
Saddened my soul with a presage of sorrows,
Bade me bemoan me for weariful morrows.
In the noon-glow
Still went they wailing their message of warning,
Till the sun sank in the seas of forgetting:
Then, as the night
Followed, wide-winged, in the steps of the setting
And the day gathered its garments to go,
Took up the tale with the last of the light,
Whispered, “Heigho!”
II.
What was their meaning?
Nay, as I hearkened and hearkened, at first, it a warning
Given to me,
A presage of evil to come, to my weening,
Seemed it must be.
Yet, as I listened, came daybreak, and morning on morning,
Night upon night;
Dawn after dawn through the deeps of the darkness outhollowed
Its way to the light;
Sun after sun rose and set; moons waxed red and waxed white:
Yet, in despite
All that I feared, there came nought of the stress I awaited;
None of the buffets I looked for from Fortune's unright
Fell on my head from the cloud-rack above me; nought followed
Other than that of the courses of night and of day,
Other than that by world's wont and life's usance forefated.
Brighter my day than of wont was, indeed, not nor duller;
Still went the stream of my life its monotonous way;
Nothing there happened to hasten it: yet was its colour Still the same grey.
III.
Then to myself, Why perturb thee, I said, with the seeking
Ill, where there's none?
Why in the bird-voices hear, with their dole thine own eking,
Up from their graves sorrows calling long dead and fordone,
Auguries evil of days and of nights unbegun?
Knowest thou not, by the Past, how the theme of their speaking
Nowise thou art?
Nay, but the canker incurable, still that lies eating
At the world's heart,
All the wild pulses of pain passing words that are beating
Still in its veins,
All the despair that dumb Nature is ever repeating,
Still in her speech inarticulate for the outspelling
Striving, with thunders and lightnings and tempests and rains,
This, this it is that the birds in their fashion are telling,
Not of thy dole
Chanting nor yet at thy fortune for fair or foul guessing.
Nay, still in song, they, the sorrows of Nature expressing,
Tell the ineffable tale of the pain that is pressing
On the world's soul.
