Sonnets and Other Poems Chiefly Religious :: :: University of Virginia Library

Death has not overtaken thee,
Although thy voice no more is heard.
Thy lovely spirit, soaring free
And ever singing, like the bird
That mounts in song the azure height,
Has vanished into heavenly light.

But I, who toil and cannot soar;
Who have not skill to speak; whose thought
Demands the written page, before
It can attain the form it sought;
Nor can, like thine, with music aid
The charm by words but half conveyed;

Whose soul is but as earth to fire,
Or night to morn, compared to thine;
Why do I feel such strong desire
In that high world of light divine

The music of thy voice to hear,
Which never charmed on earth my ear?

Thou couldst have been to me, I feel,
A sister and a friend, with voice
The discords of my life to heal,
And teach my spirit to rejoice.
And I to thee might well have taught
Lessons with equal blessings fraught;

I would have taught thee to refrain
Thy thoughts' and words' too eager flow;
In perfectness to guide thy strain
Of holy poetry; to know
How “tasks in hours of insight willed
May be through hours of gloom fulfilled.”

Thy works were but thy smallest part,
Mere casual sparks that glanced and glowed;
Thou shouldst have mused, and kept thy heart
Burning in silence, till it flowed
Into a mould of verse sublime,
Meet to endure through agelong time.

Through time!—but what is time to those
For whom eternity is won?
Thou dwellest in the bright repose
That has no need of moon or sun,
Where all have light to know their own,
For all shall know as they are known.

There, in the light of endless days,
A brother thou shalt find in me;
And all the rivers of our praise
Shall flow into the crystal sea,
From voices raised apart on earth,
But mingled in the second birth.

See her “Memorials” (Nisbet and Co.), p. 308.

Matthew Arnold.