Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/292

264 Love's face is pressing;

Listens and waits,

Beseeching the Fates

For heart-beat and breath—

Sign clear and valid,

Life still confessing.

Dead! He is dead!

All is lost!—He has fled.

IV

Behold now, a moving,

A flutter of life!

Forth from the starkness,

Horror, and slime,

See, he doth climb.

With himself is the strife;

Back to the loving

From mire and the darkness,

Back to the sun!

He has fought—he has won.

"THIS HOUR MY HEART WENT FORTH, AS IN OLD DAYS"

hour my heart went forth, as in old days,

To one I loved, forgetting she was dead—

So fluttered back the message, like the dove

That found no rest in all the weltering world.

Is it then so—all blankness and black void,

No welcome, no response, no voice, no sign?

Ah, Heaven! let us be foolish—give us faith

In what is not; cheat us a little longer;

Comfort us mortals with envisioned forms;

Let us, tho' but in dreams, see spirits near,