The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Not thou alone, but all things fair and good
Live here bereft in vestal widowhood
Or wane in radiant circlet incomplete.
Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet
Stands on a tombstone. Hope, with tearful eyes
Stares all night long on unillumined skies.
Virtue, an orphan, begs from door to door:
Beside a cold hearth on a stranger's floor
Sits exiled Honour. Song, a vacant type
Hangs on that tree, whose fruitage ne'er was ripe
Her harp, and bids the casual wind thereon
Lament what might be, fabling what is gone.
Our childhood's world of wonder melts like dew;
Youth's guardian genius bids our youth adieu
And oft the wedded is a widow too.
The best of bridals here is but a troth;
Only in heaven is ratified the oath:

341

There, there alone, is clasped in full fruition
That sacred joy which passed not Eden's gates,
For here the soul is mocked with dream and vision,
And outward sense, uniting, separates.
The Bride of Brides, a maid and widow here,
Invokes her Lord, and finds—a Comforter:
Her loftiest fane is but a visible porch
To sealed Creation's omnipresent Church.

Zealous that nobler gifts than earth's should live
Fortune I praise; but praise her, fugitive.
The Roman praised her permanent; but we
Have learned her lore, and paid a heavy fee,
Have tracked her promise to its brake of wiles,
And sounded all the shallows of her smiles.
Fortune not gives but sells, and takes instead
A heart made servile, and a discrowned head.
Too soon she comes, and drowns in swamps of sloth
The soul contemplative and active; both;
Or comes too late and, with malignant art
Leaps on the lance that rives the sufferer's heart
Showering her affluence on a breast supine.
Her best of gifts the usurer's seal and sign
Sustain, and pawn man's life to Destiny.
Ah! mightier things than man like man can die!

Between the ruin and the work half done
I sit: the raw wreck is the sorrier one.
Here drops old Desmond's Keep in slow decay:
There the unfinished Mole is washed away.
The moment's fickle promise, and the vast
And consummated greatness, both are past.

342

We sink, and none is better for our fall:
We suffer most: but suffering comes to all:
Our sighs but echoes are of earlier sighs;
And in our agonies we plagiarize.
O'er all the earth old States in ruin lie,
And new Ambitions topple from their sky:
Greatness walks lame while clad in mortal mould;
The good are weak: unrighteous are the bold.
Love by Self-love is murdered, or Distrust;
And earth-born Virtue has its ‘dust to dust.’
This Ireland knows. The famine years go by,
And each its ranks of carnage heaps more high:
What voice once manly and what hand once strong
Arraigns, resists, or mitigates the wrong?
The future shall be as the present hour:
The havoc past, again the slaves of Power
Shall boast because once more the harvest waves
In fraudulent brightness o'er a million graves.
Why weep for ties once ours, relaxed or broken?
If weep we must, our tears are all bespoken:
One thing is worthy of them, one alone—
A world's inherent baseness; and our own.

Type of my country, sad, and chaste, and wise!
Forgive the gaze of too regardful eyes:
I saw the black robe, and the aspect pale
And heard in dream that country's dying wail.
Like Night her form arose: as shades in night
Are lost thy sorrowing beauty vanished from my sight.

‘Laudo manentem.’—Horace.

University of Virginia Library

WIDOWHOOD.