Page:The Poems of Oscar Wilde.pdf/107

 Sing on! sing on! O feathered Niobe,

Thou canst make sorrow beautiful, and steal

From joy its sweetest music, not as we

Who by dead voiceless silence strive to heal

Our too untented wounds, and do but keep

Pain barricadoed in our hearts, and murder pillowed sleep.

Sing louder yet, why must I still behold

The wan white face of that deserted Christ,

Whose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold,

Whose smitten lips my lips so oft have kissed,

And now in mute and marble misery

Sits in his lone dishonoured House and weeps, perchance for me?

O Memory cast down thy wreathèd shell!

Break thy hoarse lute O sad Melpomene!

O Sorrow, Sorrow keep thy cloistered cell

Nor dim with tears this limpid Castaly!

Cease, Philomel, thou dost the forest wrong

To vex its sylvan quiet with such wild impassioned song!

Cease, cease, or if 't is anguish to be dumb

Take from the pastoral thrush her simpler air,

Whose jocund carelessness doth more become

This English woodland than thy keen despair, 93