Oft as I leave my home for daily duties A sudden strange foreboding fills my heart; Turning, I gaze upon its homely beauties While foolish fancies start: Fancies of flaming walls, of mournful embers, Of funeral ashes waiting my return, And all the sadness of bereft Decembers Comes as I pause and yearn. Oft as I look upon our household darling, Or see my wife move gracious through the day, The one as madly merry as a starling, The other calm alway, I hear -- ah, silly brooding! -- but I hear it, A tolling bell would tear my very life, And see beyond me in the land of spirit My baby and my wife. Mere empty moods! and yet who does not know them, And shudder while he owns their emptiness; And who, in second thinking, does not owe them More than he dares confess? -- A softened heart, a soul more bent on kindness, A vision that in trusting prospect sees, Spite of the thronging world and mortal blindness, God's glad eternities! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A FOREST HYMN by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT ONLY A WOMAN by DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK IN THE MORNING by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR SPELT FROM SIBYL'S LEAVES by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS TO MY MOTHER by EDGAR ALLAN POE THE FALL OF JERUSALEM by ALFRED TENNYSON |