University of Virginia Library


45

EVENING

The strangled breath
Of life and death
Fails to a lost complaint and dies,
And softer than sleep a tawny light
Furrows with fire the dawn of night
As the moon swells soft o'er the ocean's white
Like love through the desert centuries.
And the long-linked years
Bring their large arrears
Of sorrow and passion and great surmise,
And I know with a sense of familiar pain
That the dead hopes never can come again,
That the lust and struggle and tears are vain,
While ever the future smiles and lies.