| |
| YES, faith is a goodly anchor; | |
| When skies are sweet as a psalm, | |
| At the bows it lolls so stalwart, | |
| In its bluff, broad-shouldered calm. | |
| |
| And when over breakers to leeward | 5 |
| The tattered surges are hurled, | |
| It may keep our head to the tempest, | |
| With its grip on the base of the world. | |
| |
| But, after the shipwreck, tell me | |
| What help in its iron thews, | 10 |
| Still true to the broken hawser, | |
| Deep down among sea-weed and ooze? | |
| |
| In the breaking gulfs of sorrow, | |
| When the helpless feet stretch out | |
| And find in the deeps of darkness | 15 |
| No footing so solid as doubt, | |
| |
| Then better one spar of Memory, | |
| One broken plank of the Past, | |
| That our human heart may cling to, | |
| Though hopeless of shore at last! | 20 |
| |
| To the spirit its splendid conjectures, | |
| To the flesh its sweet despair, | |
| Its tears o’er the thin-worn locket | |
| With its anguish of deathless hair! | |
| |
| Immortal? I feel it and know it, | 25 |
| Who doubts it of such as she? | |
| But that is the pang’s very secret,— | |
| Immortal away from me. | |
| |
| There ’s a narrow ridge in the graveyard | |
| Would scarce stay a child in his race, | 30 |
| But to me and my thought it is wider | |
| Than the star-sown vague of Space. | |
| |
| Your logic, my friend, is perfect, | |
| Your moral most drearily true; | |
| But, since the earth clashed on her coffin, | 35 |
| I keep hearing that, and not you. | |
| |
| Console if you will, I can bear it; | |
| ’T is a well-meant alms of breath; | |
| But not all the preaching since Adam | |
| Has made Death other than Death. | 40 |
| |
| It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,— | |
| That jar of our earth, that dull shock | |
| When the ploughshare of deeper passion | |
| Tears down to our primitive rock. | |
| |
| Communion in spirit! Forgive me, | 45 |
| But I, who am earthly and weak, | |
| Would give all my incomes from dream-land | |
| For a touch of her hand on my cheek. | |
| |
| That little shoe in the corner, | |
| So worn and wrinkled and brown, | 50 |
| With its emptiness confutes you, | |
| And argues your wisdom down. | |
| |
