Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/238

ÆT. 37] His love,—his folly and faithlessness, maybe; And still in turn I gave him voice to pray Such prayers as cling about an empty day.

Thou, keen-eyed, reading me, mayst read him through, For surely little is there left behind; No power great deeds unnameable to do; No knowledge for which words he may not find, No love of things as vague as autumn wind— Earth of the earth lies hidden by my clay, The idle singer of an empty day!

Children we twain are, saith he, late made wise, In love, but in all else most childish still, And seeking still the pleasure of our eyes, And what our ears with sweetest sounds may fill; Not fearing Love, lest these things he should kill; Howe'er his pain by pleasure doth he lay, Making a strange tale of an empty day.

Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant; Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere, Though still the less we knew of its intent: The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year, Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair, Hung round about a little room, where play Weeping and laughter of man's empty day.

"I don't think," he writes within a few days of the date of these verses, "people really want to die because of mental pain, that is, if they are imaginative people; they want to live to see the play played out fairly." Such at all events was his own feeling. People who have not this imaginative instinct often wonder how a poet can bear to lay open his inmost feelings, and uncover the weaknesses of which man is made: still oftener the self-revelation passes clean over the heads of his audience, and so far are they from wondering that they do not even notice. It is the knowledge, no doubt, that all of his innermost heart, his love and hope and sorrow, which he pours into his verses is to the unsympathetic reader simply meaningless, which