 | The poems and prose writings of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield |  |
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Triumph and tears, the holydays of youth,
The winter of hoar, stricken age, the pride
Of mind and meekness of a heart sore tried,
Rapture and anguish, poverty and pomp,
And glory and the tomb—like rivals, crowd
Along the isthmus of our being, doomed
To vanish momently in billowy gloom!
The dewlight of the morn in storm departs;
The moonbeams strewing rifted clouds, like smiles
Breathed from the bosom of Divinity,
Sink, ere the daydawn, in the tempest's rack;
Yet on o'er buried centuries—the dead dust
Of ages—once like the starr'd heavens inspired
By myriad passions, dreaming miracles,
And winged conceptions infinite as air—
Time, the triumphant, in his trophied car,
Moves sternly, trampling ardent hearts to earth.
Oh, diademed Hypocrisies! budding Bliss,
The mildew sears—sky-soaring Hope, that dies
In its birth moment—Love, which on its shrine
Of incense perishes—and Fame, that drinks
The bane of human breath and falls alone!
The same arena, judges, wrestlers, crown—
The same brief transport and unsolaced doom—
First, madness, and then vanity—the world
Must be, till time is quenched, what it hath been,
The bounded circle of chained thought, trod down
By nations hastening into nothingness,
Echoing the groans of Pain's ten thousand years,
And drenched by tears that find no comforter!
| The poems and prose writings of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield | |