The Unknown Eros. Coventry Patmore

         Is this the portent of the day nigh past,

      And of a restless grave

      O’er which the eternal sadness gathers fast;

      Or but the heaped wave

      Of some chance, wandering tide,

      Such as that world of awe

      Whose circuit, listening to a foreign law,

      Conjunctures ours at unguess’d dates and wide,

      Does in the Spirit’s tremulous ocean draw,

      To pass unfateful on, and so subside?

      Thee, whom ev’n more than Heaven loved I have,

      And yet have not been true

      Even to thee,

      I, dreaming, night by night, seek now to see,

      And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursue

      Thro’ sordid streets and lanes

      And houses brown and bare

      And many a haggard stair

      Ochrous with ancient stains,

      And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,

      In whose unhaunted glooms

      Dead pauper generations, witless of the sun,

      Their course have run;

      And ofttimes my pursuit

      Is check’d of its dear fruit

      By things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,

      Furious that I should keep

      Their forfeit power to weep,

      And mock, with living fear, their mournful malice thin.

      But ever, at the last, my way I win

      To where, with perfectly sad patience, nurst

      By sorry comfort of assured worst,

      Ingrain’d in fretted cheek and lips that pine,

      On pallet poor

      Thou lyest, stricken sick,

      Beyond love’s cure,

      By all the world’s neglect, but chiefly mine.

      Then sweetness, sweeter than my tongue can tell,

      Does in my bosom well,

      And tears come free and quick

      And more and more abound

      For piteous passion keen at having found,

      After exceeding ill, a little good;

      A little good

      Which, for the while,

      Fleets with the current sorrow of the blood,

      Though no good here has heart enough to smile.

         My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes

      And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,

      Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,

      I struck him, and dismiss’d

      With hard words and unkiss’d,

      His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

      Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,

      I visited his bed,

      But found him slumbering deep,

      With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet

      From his late sobbing wet.

      And I, with moan,

      Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;

      For, on a table drawn beside his head,

      He had put, within his reach,

      A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,

      A piece of glass abraded by the beach

      And six or seven shells,

      A bottle with bluebells

      And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,

      To comfort his sad heart.

      So when that night I pray’d

      To God, I wept, and said:

      Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,

      Not vexing Thee in death,

      And Thou rememberest of what toys

      We made our joys,

      How weakly understood,

      Thy great commanded good,

      Then, fatherly not less

      Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,

      Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,

      ‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’

         The stony rock of death’s insensibility

      Well’d yet awhile with honey of thy love

      And then was dry;

      Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove,

      Nor all thy kind, long letters, nor the band

      Which really spann’d

      Thy body chaste and warm,

      Thenceforward move

      Upon the stony rock their wearied charm.

      At last, then, thou wast dead.

      Yet would I not despair,

      But wrought my daily task, and daily said

      Many and many a fond, unfeeling prayer,

      To keep my vows of faith to thee from harm.

      In vain.

      ‘For ’tis,’ I said, ‘all one,

      The wilful faith, which has no joy or pain,

      As if ’twere none.’

      Then look’d I miserably round

      If aught of duteous love were left undone,

      And nothing found.

      But, kneeling in a Church, one Easter-Day,

      It came to me to say:

      ‘Though there is no intelligible rest,

      In Earth or Heaven,

      For me, but on her breast,

      I yield her up, again to have her given,

      Or not, as, Lord, Thou wilt, and that for aye.’

      And the same night, in slumber