| William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Georgian Verse. 1909. | | | | Why Art Thou Silent? | | By William Wordsworth (1770–1850) |
| | | WHY art thou silent? Is thy love a plant | |
| Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air | |
| Of absence withers what was once so fair? | |
| Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant? | |
| Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant— | 5 |
| Bound to thy service with unceasing care, | |
| The mind’s least generous wish a mendicant | |
| For naught but what thy happiness could spare. | |
| Speak—though this soft warm heart, once free to hold | |
| A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine, | 10 |
| Be left more desolate, more dreary cold | |
| Than a forsaken bird’s-nest fill’d with snow | |
| ’Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine— | |
| Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know! | | | | |
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