when I came where thou wert laid, and saw The natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame, And the encroaching grass, with casual flaw, Framing the stone to age where was thy name, I knew not how to feel, nor what to be Towards thy fate’s material secrecy. 

 

V.

 How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action, When the miserly press of each day’s need Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction My soul appalled at the world’s work’s time-greed? How can I pause my thoughts upon the task My soul was born to think that it must do When every moment has a thought to ask To fit the immediate craving of its cue? The coin I’d heap for marrying my Muse And build our home i’th’ greater Time-to-be Becomes dissolved by needs of each day’s use And I feel beggared of infinity, Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven. 

 

VI.

 As a bad orator, badly o’er-book-skilled, Doth overflow his purpose with made heat, And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed What should have been an inner instinct’s feat; Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned, Lacking the subtler music in his measure, With useless care labours but to be spurned, Courting in alien speech the Muse’s pleasure; I study how to love or how to hate, Estranged by consciousness from sentiment, With a thought feeling forced to be sedate Even when the feeling’s nature is violent; As who would learn to swim without the river, When nearest to the trick, as far as ever. 

 

VII.

 Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee— That entire death shall null my entire thought; And I feel torture, not that I believe thee, But that I cannot disbelieve thee not. Shall that of me that now contains the stars Be by the very contained stars survived? Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars An all unjust Fate’s truth from being believed? Conjecture cannot fit to the seen world A garment of its thought untorn or covering, Or with its stuffed garb forge an otherworld Without itself its dead deceit discovering; So, all being possible, an idle thought may Less idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay. 

 

VIII.

 How many masks wear we, and undermasks, Upon our countenance of soul, and 

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