University of Virginia Library

What fell to him after that last sad sight
How shall I say? it may be that cold night
More than most nights of winter was fulfilled
With mournful aimless dreams; that the morn, stilled
By iron frost, white world and sky of grey,
Had more of blank despair than e'en such day
Will often have—that on his weary bed
The hopeless love lifted up his head
To hearken, and a strange wild thrill did cross
His dreary oft-told tale of endless loss
And waning hope, as the wind rushing by
Seemed in the breast of it to bear a cry
That well nigh shaped itself into a name,
A name unknown: until there grew a shame
Of his own lonely grief within his heart
And to that cry he cried to have a part
In some more god-like sorrow than the days
Shed dully on his petty tangled ways—
I know not, I—but know as the years grew
Some rumour of the tale twixt false and true
Did reach men's hearts, whereof it came that some
Told of sad shapes haunting that Thracian home,
Sad voices in the chestnut-woods about.
And some that when the night held most of doubt
And terror round the black Laconian wood,
When heaviest the dark o'er it did brood,
When wildest roared the wind about its trees,
When most the moonlight made ill images
Of the o'erhanging boughs about its brink
And to its narrowest the vexed stream did shrink—
That at such tides, amid the wind heard shrill,
Cleaving the dark like threat of god-sent ill,
Low in the hush of the dread summer night
The name of that dead love, that lost delight
Would come upon the world—Eurydice,
What hideth so thy hands thine eyes from me.
But the world wore through years of good and bad,
And tales that less of pity in them had,
Or more of hope, of Orpheus men 'gan tell:
Such as how death at last to him befell
Long after this: for he was slain, they said,
By the God-maddened bands that Bacchus led
Adown the banks of Hebrus: other some
Say that the tuneful muses took him home,
That on the cloud-hid steep of Helicon
From out the world's grief a calm life he won,
Nothing forgotten of his feverish pain,
Nothing regretted, but all spent and vain,
And he not glad nor grieved, but God indeed.

Ah let such go their ways, his earthly need
Ye know; his earthly longing and defeat.
Thank him low-voiced that even this is sweet
Unto our dying hearts that needs must gain
A little hope from pity and from pain.