Page:The New Penelope.djvu/304

298 If I but ope my lips, I sob;

If but an eyelid lift, I weep;

I deprecate all good or ill,

And only wish for endless sleep.

For who, I ask, has set my feet

In all these dark and troubled ways?

And who denies my soul's desire,

When with its might it cries and prays?

In my unconscious veins there runs

Perchance, some old ancestral taint;

In Eve I sinned: poor Eve and I!

We each may utter one complaint:—

One and the same—for knowledge came

Too late to save her paradise;

And I my paradise have lost;

Forsooth because I am not wise.

O vain traditions! small the aid

We women gather from your lore:

Why, when the world was lost, did death

Not come our children's birth before?

It had been better to have died,

Sole prey of death, and ended so;

Than to have dragged through endless time,

One long, unbroken trail of woe.

To suffer, yet not expiate;

To die at last, yet not atone;

To mourn our heirship to a guilt,

Erased by innocent blood alone!

You lift your hands in shocked surprise;

You say enough I have not prayed:

Can prayer go back through centuries,

And change the web of fate one braid?