Chapter 4

How could I know, how know Those laughing words when drenched with sobbing so? Another voice than yours, than yours, he hath! My dear, was’t worth his breath, His mighty utterance?—yet he saith, and saith! This dreadful Death to his own dreadfulness Doth dreadful wrong, This dreadful childish babble on his tongue! That iron tongue made to speak sentences, And wisdom insupportably complete, Why should it only say the long night through, In mimicry of you,— “_A cup of chocolate_, _One farthing is the rate_, _You drink it through a straw_, _a straw_, _a straw_!” Oh, of all sentences, Piercingly incomplete! Why did you teach that fatal mouth to draw, Child, impermissible awe, From your old trivialness? Why have you done me this Most unsustainable wrong, And into Death’s control Betrayed the secret places of my soul? Teaching him that his lips, Uttering their native earthquake and eclipse, Could never so avail To rend from hem to hem the ultimate veil Of this most desolate Spirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate,— Nay, never so have wrung From eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unmeet; As when his terrible dotage to repeat Its little lesson learneth at your feet; As when he sits among His sepulchres, to play With broken toys your hand has cast away, With derelict trinkets of the darling young. Why have you taught—that he might so complete His awful panoply From your cast playthings—why, This dreadful childish babble to his tongue, Dreadful and sweet?

FOOTNOTES

{55} NOTE—I have throughout this poem used an asterisk to indicate the caesura in the middle of the line, after the manner of the old Saxon section-point.