Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/212

 to think, more to be left alone George Annandale said something to his friends A. word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough To suit their funeral gaze and went upstairs; And there, in the one room that he could call His own, he found a sort of meaningless Annoyance in the mute familiar things That filled it; for the grate's monotonous gleam Was not the gleam that he had known before, The books were not the books that used to be, The place was not the place. There was a lack Of something; and the certitude of death Itself, as with a furtive questioning, Hovered, and he could not yet understand. He knew that she was gone there was no need Of any argued proof to tell him that, For they had buried her that afternoon, Under the leaves and snow; and still there was A doubt, a pitiless doubt a plunging doubt, That struck him, and upstartled when it struck, The vision, the old thought in him. There was A lack, and one that wrenched him; but it was Not that not that. There was a present sense Of something indeterminably near The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness That would not be foreboding. And if not, What then? or was it anything at all? Yes, it was something it was everything But what was everything? or anything?