To Monica Thought Dying
YOU, O the piteous you!Who all the long night throughAnticipatedlyDisclose yourself to meAlready in the waysBeyond our human comfortable days;How can you deem what DeathImpitiably saithTo me, who listening wakeFor your poor sake?When a grown woman diesYou know we think unceasinglyWhat things she said, how sweet, how wise;And these do make our misery.But you were (you to meThe dead anticipatedly!)You—eleven years, was’t not, or so?—Were just a child, you know;And so you never saidThings sweet immeditatably and wiseTo interdict from closure my wet eyes:But foolish things, my dead, my dead!Little and laughable,Your age that fitted well.And was it such things all unmemorable,Was it such things could makeMe sob all night for your implacable sake?
Yet, as you said to me,In pretty make-believe of revelry,So the night long said DeathWith his magniloquent breath;(And that remembered laughterWhich in our daily uses followed after,Was all untuned to pity and to awe):“A cup of chocolate,One farthing is the rate,You drink it through a straw.”
How could I know, how knowThose laughing words when drenched with sobbing so?Another voice than yours, than yours, he hath!My dear, was’t worth his breath,His mighty utterance?—yet he saith, and saith!This dreadful Death to his own dreadfulnessDoth dreadful wrong,This dreadful childish babble on his tongue!That iron tongue made to speak sentences,And wisdom insupportably complete,Why should it only say the long night through,In mimicry of you,—“A cup of chocolate,One farthing is the rate,You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw!”Oh, of all sentences,Piercingly incomplete!Why did you teach that fatal mouth to draw,Child, impermissible awe,From your old trivialness?Why have you done me thisMost unsustainable wrong,And into Death’s controlBetrayed the secret places of my soul?Teaching him that his lips,Uttering their native earthquake and eclipse,Could never so availTo rend from hem to hem the ultimate veilOf this most desolateSpirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate,—Nay, never so have wrungFrom eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unmeet;As when his terrible dotage to repeatIts little lesson learneth at your feet;As when he sits amongHis sepulchres, to playWith broken toys your hand has cast away,With derelict trinkets of the darling young.Why have you taught—that he might so completeHis awful panoplyFrom your cast playthings—why,This dreadful childish babble to his tongue,Dreadful and sweet?
NOTE—I have throughout this poem used an asterisk to indicate the caesura in the middle of the line, after the manner of the old Saxon section-point. ↩