Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SORROWS, by RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES


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SORROWS, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sister sorrow! Sit beside me
Last Line: The tide of ill.
Alternate Author Name(s): Houghton, 1st Baron; Houghton, Lord
Subject(s): Grief; Sorrow; Sadness


I.

SISTER Sorrow! sit beside me,
Or, if I must wander, guide me;
Let me take thy hand in mine,
Cold alike are mine and thine.

Think not, Sorrow, that I hate thee, --
Think not I am frightened at thee, --
Thou art come for some good end,
I will treat thee as a friend.

I will say that thou art bound
My unshielded soul to wound
By some force without thy will
And art tender-minded still.

I will say thou givest scope
To the breath and light of hope;
That thy gentle tears have weight
Hardest hearts to penetrate:

That thy shadow brings together
Friends long lost in sunny weather,
With an hundred offices
Beautiful and blest as these.

Softly takest Thou the crown
From my haughty temples down;
Place it on thine own pale brow,
Pleasure wears one, -- why not Thou?

Let the blossoms glisten there
On thy long unbanded hair,
And, when I have borne my pain,
Thou wilt give them me again.

If Thou goest, sister Sorrow!
I shall look for Thee to-morrow, --
I shall often see Thee drest
As a masquerading guest:

And howe'er Thou hid'st the name,
I shall know Thee still the same
As Thou sitt'st beside me now,
With my garland on thy brow.

II.

O! MOURNFUL sequence of self-drunken days,
When jovial youth had range of Nature's store!
With fever-thirst for pleasure and for praise,
I nauseate every draught, and ask for more.

Look on me well, and early steep thy soul
In one pure Love, and it will last thee long;
Fresh airs shall breathe while sweltering thunders roll,
And summer noons shall leave thee cool and strong.

Across the desert, 'mid thy thirsty kind,
Thy healthy heart shall move apace and calm,
Nor yearning trace the horizon far behind,
Where rests the fountain and the lonely palm.

III.

I had a home wherein the weariest feet
Found sure repose;
And Hope led on laborious day to meet
Delightful close!
A cottage with broad eaves and a thick vine,
A crystal stream,
Whose mountain-language was the same as mine:
-- It was a dream!

I had a home to make the gloomiest heart
Alight with joy, --
A temple of chaste love, a place apart
From Time's annoy;
A moonlight scene of life, where all things rude
And harsh did seem
With pity rounded and by grace subdued:
-- It was a dream!

IV.

To search for lore in spacious libraries,
And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;
To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,
Watch every action, but not catch one tone; --
Amid a thousand breathless votaries,
To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone, --
Are images of that, which, hour by hour,
Consumes my heart, the strife of Will and Power.

The Beauty of the Past before my eyes
Stands ever in each fable-haunted place,
I know her form in every dark disguise,
But never look upon her open face;
O'er every limb a veil thick-folded lies,
Showing poor outline of a perfect grace,
Yet just enough to make the sickened mind
Grieve doubly for the treasures hid behind.

Through great memorials wandering to and fro,
Waves of old Time about me seem to roll,
Most like a tune heard somewhere long ago,
Whose separate notes have left upon my soul
Some footmarks as they past, and though I know
That memory's hardest toil can raise the whole
Into continuous being, never again,
I still strive on as one in love with pain. --

O Thou! to whom the wearisome disease
Of Past and Present is an alien thing,
Thou pure Existence! whose severe decrees
Forbid a living man his soul to bring
Into a timeless Eden of sweet ease,
Clear-eyed, clear-hearted, -- lay thy loving wing
In Death upon me, -- if that way alone
Thy great Creation-thought thou wilt to me make known.

V.

Her heart is sick with thinking
Of the misery of her kind,
Her mind is almost sinking,
That once so buoyant mind; --
She cannot look before her
On the evil-haunted way, --
Uphold her, oh! restore her
Thou Lord of Night and Day! --
She cries, "These things confound me,
They settle on my brain,
The very air around me
Is universal Pain.
The earth is damp with weeping,
Rarely the sun shines clear
On any but those sleeping
Upon the quiet bier.
I envy not hard hearts, but yet
I would I could sometimes forget;
I would, though but for moments, look
With comfort into Nature's book,
Nor read that everlasting frown,
Whose terror bows me wholly down.
I cannot meet each pang I see
With gratefulness that not on me
Has fallen that rod,
And make my fellow's agony
The measure of my love to God.
I bear an earnest Christian faith;
I never shrunk at thought of death;
I know the rapturous light of Heaven,
To man's unscaled vision given; --
My spirit is not blind; but when
The tortures of my brother men,
The famine of gray hairs,
The sick-beds of the poor,
Life's daily stinging cares
That crowd the proudest door,
The tombs of the long-loved,
The slowly-broken heart,
Self-gloated power unmoved
By Pity's tenderest art,
Come thronging thick about me,
Close in the world without me, --
How should I not despond?
How can I stretch my sight so far
As where things blest and holy are?
My mortal nature is too frail
To penetrate the sable veil, --
I cannot see beyond!"

VI.

Ye Roses of November,
Ye are no joy to me;
The roses I remember
Are other than ye be!
Your cordial kindred summer
Has gone by long before,
And Winter, the new-comer,
Is a Lover fierce and frore.

At sight of ye I tremble,
As ye in this bleak air;
I read a fearful symbol
In what ye are and were;
How all that's best and fairest,
When past a petty reign,
To those, who hold them dearest,
Are Pain and only Pain.

Beauty is always Beauty,
Her essences divine
The Poet, in his duty,
May labor to combine;
But Beauty wed to sorrow
Is sad, whate'er we say, --
Sad thinking for to-morrow,
Sad presence for to-day!

VII.

Why wilt Thou ever thus before me stand,
Thou ghostly Past?
Always between me and the happy land
Thy shade is cast.

Thou art no midnight phantom of remorse,
That I would lay: --
My life has run a plain unnoted course,
In open day.

I would enjoy the Present, I would live
Like one new-born:
I value not the gifts Thou hast to give --
Knowledge and Scorn.

I would, for some short moments, cease to judge --
Reckon -- compare:
And this small bliss Thou wilt persist to grudge,
Still haunting there.

Thou makest all things heavy with regrets;
Too late -- too soon:
My mind is like a sun that ever sets,
And knows no noon:

I am become the very fool of time, --
The world for me
Has no sure test of innocence or crime;
All things may be:

For every notion that has filled my brain
Leaves such a trace
That every instant it may rise again
And claim its place.

Faces and fancies I have cursed or cherished
Throng round my head;
In vain I call on thee to leave the perished --
To hide the dead.

Confused and tost on this ideal sea,
I hardly keep
A sense of weak and maimed identity,
More than in sleep:

Save when the Future wins my yearning gaze,
That shore where still
Imagination resolutely stays
The tide of ill.





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