Dear, if you knew how my poor heart
Aches for your heart by day and night—
Forever lost to life’s delight,
As seasons pass and years depart,
You would not let the invisible flame
Of hatred sear and scar your soul,
Where once in living light my name
Was lettered like an aureole!

You, who lost faith in me, will not
Believe this last confession, made
To lift your spirit from the shade
Wherein it walks and views the spot
Of my offense. But when I saw
That our love’s life must have an end,
I looked back o’er our path with awe
And traced it toward us to the sign
Where our ways severed, yours and mine.
There stood Remorse’s dreaded shape!
Your Disbelief! Your Self-Contempt!
I saw our love was not exempt
From ruin and could not escape.
We could not separate and smile,
And keep a faithful thought the while
Of understanding (like a spring
Hidden, refreshing, murmuring)
As friend sometimes takes leave of friend.
Then what was left? It was this thought
That at the last came forth to slay
Your love, without a warning brought
Ere my lips tightened to betray!

For as our love found depths too deep;
As absence almost deadened sense;
As often I awoke from sleep
And looked for hours at you, all tense,
Lest you awake and see my eyes,
Where the one thought of purest love
Shone like a fixed star’s paradise,
I learned to know that Self above—
Making the heart’s hierarchy pure—
Stands the archangel Truth, preferred—
Throned over Love which can endure
Only where Truth has stood, unstirred.
Watchful and with his torch of stars
Held o’er Love’s face, although it shows
The forehead’s pain, the bosom’s scars,
The cheeks bleached out from secret tears
In memory of impalpable blows,
Shed in the night’s long solitude.
You see I could not give you truth!
There was the Shadow in my life
Cast by the fierce Sun of my youth.
And as our day fell to the west
The Shadow lengthened and the strife
’Twixt Love and Truth within my breast
Waxed fiercer. Heaven’s deathless blue
Leaned on my hungering soul and pained
Its wings, as if a joy were lost,
Or never had been quite attained,
Or captured at too great a cost.
I could not give you truth all true.
My love for you and then the thirst
For all your love, made me accursed
Of fear that if you knew me first,
Just as I am, your heart would cease
To cherish mine. And then much more
Was this fear venom to my peace
When all the world spread out before
Our astonished eyes, as our own world,
And we its children, each for each.

This was the sleepless worm which curled
In my heart’s petals, at the root
Where my heart’s sweetness had its source.
You never saw the worm! My speech
Poised like a bee who knows the loot
Of honey’s gone, and turns his course.
I kept the petals closed, and you
Breathed at their tips, but would have known
All of their fragrance, or of blight.
That’s love—to have no place where light
And understanding have not shone.
Your face reproached me—I who knew
No sweet or bitter essences
Can be withheld from Love that keeps
An onward flight, which ever sees,
Or would see, all in the heart’s deeps.

Then Life came, and with lifted sword
Laid on our souls his dread command;
“Say your farewells, part hand from hand,
You the adorer, and adored.
Duty is seeking you! And Grief
Would have her child return and see
The changeless halls of Misery,
And the bare board and darkened hearth.”
I reeled with anguish as the earth
Sank from my feet. For oh the end
Seemed far as death! And when it came
It was my hope, my soul’s desire
To part as friend may part from friend,
And that you’d keep alive my name
Bright as an altar’s quenchless fire.
It could not be! How could it be?
I was not truth! I was not true—
I kept my soul’s real self from you.
Then I bethought me: “Since his earth
Is Autumn-stricken with a doubt
That I am worth not his love’s worth,
Were it no better he should know
Disloyalty made definite
By a suspected past re-knit,
And see our love a play played out,
Than to live through the soft decline
Of our bright day to solemn eve—
A sunset of remembrance—where
He walks devoured by love and hate—
Love for the love I strove to give,
Hate for a thought intuitive:
Some newer love her heart hath won
Or some first love hath won her back.
No, to my faith, he says, “I’ll cleave,
Believing that I can’t believe.”
“Slow death to love! Exquisite rack!”
Ah me! I had not made this fate—
The warp was stretched, the woof was spun,
The roof-tree laid long years before
You entered at the unbolted door.
“Then what is best? What can be done?
To give him back his pride and strength,
And even his peace of mind at length?
Bett

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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