Helen Whitney - Sonnets and Songs

If I might see you dead, Beloved—dead—
Your false eyes closed forever to the light,
Your false smile stilled upon my aching sight;
If I might know that nevermore your head,
Cruelly fair, could lie upon the bed
Of my torn heart; if I beheld the night
Free from your living thought—ah! if I might,
Then could my desolate soul be comforted.

For this is worst of all the woes you gave—
My heart may not forgive. The tired years go
And leave the great love weeping for a grave,
Scorned and unburied, ’neath the open sky.
I could not love you less, to see you so.
Loving you more, I might forgive—and die.

Dear, did we meet in some dim yesterday?
I half remember how the birds were mute
Among green leaves and tulip-tinted fruit,
And on the grass, beside a stream, we lay
In early twilight; faintly, far away,
Came lovely sounds adrift from silver lute,
With answered echoes of an airy flute,
While Twilight waited tiptoe, fain to stay.

Her violet eyes were sweet with mystery.
You looked in mine, the music rose and fell
Like little, lisping laughter of the sea;
Our souls were barks, wind-wafted from the shore—
Gold cup, a rose, a ruby, who can tell?
Soft—music ceases—I recall no more.

I died to-day, and yet upon my eyes
A glamour of the gorgeous summer green
Still wavers, and my brain has kept a keen,
Sweet bird-song. Glad with light, the summer skies
Are sapphire, and a purple shadow lies
Across the hills—no change is on the scene
Since happy yesterday. Ah! can it mean
The body lives when stricken spirit dies?

The blow has fallen, yet I can recall
The first of days when this dead heart drew breath—
A wondrous moon-flower waking of a heart.
Strange—then as now the moment seemed to part
Body from soul, so like are birth and death;
So did I gain, and so I lost my all.

The lights within the ice-floes are our flowers,
Lily and daffodil and violet.
Beneath these monstrous suns that never set
Tremble soft rainbows, young as Earth’s first hours,
Ancient as Time. No balm of gentle showers
Make for their growth; for them, gigantic, met
The immemorial ice and sun, to get
Such blossoms—pledge of Beauty’s bravest powers.

Violet and pale grass-green, the Spring-time dies
In the soft South. To us, in this grim world,
Daring with frozen heart and tearless eyes
The North’s white sanctity, Fate idly throws
These alms—a deathless Spring of ice enfurled,
And over all, far flung, the sunset rose.

I can believe that my Beloved dies,
That all her virtue, all her youth shall fail,
And life, her rosy life, grow cold and pale,
To bloom again in braver Paradise.
I must believe that death shall close her eyes,
And hold her heart beyond a heavy veil,
Where silences surround her spirit frail
And waste the form where all my loving lies.

Ah, God! but no. And is my love so weak?
Her heart may pause, may falter and grow still,
But not her laugh, the color in her cheek—
That may not fade; the catch that lifts her breath,
Sobbing against my heart. Essay your will—
These are too dear to fill your grave, O Death!

When one has heard the message of the Rose,
For what faint other calling shall he care?
Dark broodings turn to find their lonely lair;
The vain world keeps her posturing and pose.
He, with his crimson secret, which bestows
Heaven on his heart, to Heaven lifts his prayer,
And knows all glory trembling through the air
As on triumphal journeying he goes.

So through green woodlands in the twilight dim,