The Mourner

I have no heart for noon-tide and the sun,

But I will take me where more tender night

Shakes, fold on fold, her dewy darkness down.

And shelters me that I may weep in peace,

And feel no pitying eyes, and hear no voice

Attempt my grief in comfort's alien tongue.


Where cypresses, more black than night is black,

Border straight paths, or where, on hillside slopes,

The dim grglimmer of the olive trees

Lies like a breath, a ghost, upon the dark,

There will I wander when the nightingale

Ceases, and even the veil`ed stars withdraw

Their tremulous light, there find myself at rest,

A silence and a shadow in the gloom.


But all the dead of all the world shall know

The pacing of my sable-sandall'd feet,

And know my tear-drenched veil along the grass,

And think them less forsaken in their graves,

Saying: There's one remembers, one still mourns;

For the forgotten dead are dead indeed.