Poems eBook

Denis Florence MacCarthy
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 107 pages of information about Poems.

Poems eBook

Denis Florence MacCarthy
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 107 pages of information about Poems.

How could I leave thee thus, Eurydice? 
Without one look, one glance, Eurydice? 
And I perchance no more to gaze on thee,
Snared by some fatal falsehood from thy side? 
Yet strove I hard; until at length I came
Where Lethe flow’d before me, faint and dim;
Ye gods! how could I cross it from my love,
That might wash out her memory for aye;
That I should live and dream of her no more;
That I should live and love her never more;
That I should sing no more, Eurydice;
That I should leave her in the grip of Hell,
Nor bear her forth e’en on the wings of thought. 
And so I turn’d to gaze, Eurydice! 
I turn’d to clasp thee, O Eurydice!—­
And lo! thy form straightway dissolved away;
Thy beauty in the light dissolved away;
And Hades and all things dissolved away;
Until I found me on thy cold, cold grave,
Amid the grass that I would grew o’er me,
Clasping us close within one narrow home,
Where I no more might wake and find thee gone.—­
The earth oped not unto my frantic cries;
The portals closed thee from me evermore—­
Else had I melted Hell itself with prayers,
And borne thee back to Earth triumphantly.

I cried, heart-stricken, on Proserpina;
I rent the rocks around with endless prayers;
I told her all the story of our love,
I launch’d my sorrows on her woman’s heart;
I sought her through the barren winter-time,
The woful winter-time for Earth and me;
And, “Oh!” I thought, “her soul will soon relent,
And rush in crystal torrents from her eyes,
Till in the joy of sympathetic tears,
She woo my love from Pluto’s stony heart.” 
I waited, and I question’d long the Spring;
I question’d every flower and budding spray,
If thou didst come among them back again;
I conjured each bright blossom, each green leaf,
That, leaving Earth, she bears full-arm’d to Dis,
But backward flingeth ere her glad return,
That every step of glorious liberty,
Fall upon flowers throughout the happy land;
But never came response, Eurydice,—­
The flowers were dumb, O lost Eurydice! 
They would not see thee spring from Earth like them,
Outshining all their fainter loveliness,
And so they left me to my lorn despair;
She left me lorn, O false Proserpina! 
And never more may I behold thee here,
In Spring or Summer, O Eurydice! 
By day or night, O lost Eurydice!

They shall not keep me from thee, O beloved! 
Dis shall not keep me from thee, O beloved;
But I shall shake his gates in my despair,
Until they open wide to let me pass;
I’ll take my life up like a mighty rock,
And so beat breaches in the walls of Time;
I’ll cast existence from me like a wrestler’s robes,
And with my supple, naked soul throw Fate;
I’ll snap the shackles whose Promethean links
Bind down my soul unto this narrow earth.—­
Dost hear my voice dim floating to thee now,
Along the waves that ripple at my feet? 
Thus do I come to thee, Eurydice,
Through waving water-floods, Eurydice,
I come, I come, beloved Eurydice!

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Poems from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.