Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/181

STODDARD'S LAST POEM

When dear words have all been said

And bright eyes no longer shine

(Ah, not thine!)

Close these weary eyes of mine,

And bear me to the lonely bed

Where unhonored I shall lie,

While the tardy years go by,

Without question or reply

From the long-forgotten dead.

HIS threnody proved to be the swan-song of its author—of the old minstrel who in his springtime had made the early volumes of this magazine tuneful with a unique succession of ballads, songs, and graver poems. If, as Shelley says, "We begin in what we end," it is fitting that this poem, his wife's requiem and his own, should be enshrined in the first new number of a periodical in which his gift attained maturity and secured for him, notwithstanding the old-time rule of anonymity, a repute that justified his adoption of authorship as a profession.

The lyric now printed for the first time was the only one perfected from many broken cadences which came to him in the final year of his life. It was composed while his wife, Elizabeth Stoddard (older than himself), was plainly nearing her end. She died in her eightieth year, August 1, 1902: the eleventh day after the date affixed to the poem. Eleven months before, the wedded poets had lost their only son, Lorimer—author of poems, pictures, and successful dramas,—and Mr. Stoddard had borne up under the affliction less stoically than his wife; for a time seeming dazed, and having illusions that were intensified [167]