Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/50

18   And, vainly longing, gazes o’er
 * The waste of wave and sky;

So from the desert of my fate
 * I gaze across the past;

Forever on life’s dial-plate
 * The shade is backward cast!

I ’ve wandered wide from shore to shore,
 * I ’ve knelt at many a shrine;

And bowed me to the rocky floor
 * Where Bethlehem’s tapers shine;

And by the Holy Sepulchre
 * I ’ve pledged my knightly sword

To Christ, His blessed Church, and her,
 * The Mother of our Lord.

Oh, vain the vow, and vain the strife!
 * How vain do all things seem!

My soul is in the past, and life
 * To-day is but a dream!

In vain the penance strange and long,
 * And hard for flesh to bear;

The prayer, the fasting, and the thong,
 * And sackcloth shirt of hair.

The eyes of memory will not sleep,—
 * Its ears are open still;

And vigils with the past they keep
 * Against my feeble will.

And still the loves and joys of old
 * Do evermore uprise;

I see the flow of locks of gold,
 * The shine of loving eyes!

Ah me! upon another’s breast
 * Those golden locks recline;

I see upon another rest
 * The glance that once was mine.

“O faithless priest! O perjured knight!”
 * I hear the Master cry;

“Shut out the vision from thy sight,
 * Let Earth and Nature die.

“The Church of God is now thy spouse,
 * And thou the bridegroom art;

Then let the burden of thy vows
 * Crush down thy human heart!”

In vain! This heart its grief must know,
 * Till life itself hath ceased,

And falls beneath the self-same blow
 * The lover and the priest!

O pitying Mother! souls of light,
 * And saints and martyrs old!

Pray for a weak and sinful knight,
 * A suffering man uphold.

Then let the Paynim work his will,
 * And death unbind my chain,

Ere down yon blue Carpathian hill
 * The sun shall fall again.

the God of all sure mercies let my blessing rise to-day, From the scoffer and the cruel He hath plucked the spoil away; Yea, He who cooled the furnace around the faithful three, And tamed the Chaldean lions, hath set His handmaid free!

Last night I saw the sunset melt through my prison bars, Last night across my damp earth-floor fell the pale gleam of stars; In the coldness and the darkness all through the long night-time, My grated casement whitened with autumn’s early rime.

Alone, in that dark sorrow, hour after hour crept by; Star after star looked palely in and sank adown the sky; No sound amid night’s stillness, save that which seemed to be The dull and heavy beating of the pulses of the sea;