A poem a day

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Growing Old
-------by Matthew Arnold
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!

'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Grief
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I TELL you hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair
Half-taught in anguish through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach.
Full desertness
In souls as countries lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens.
Deep-hearted man express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.

Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep it could arise and go.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Hardy
--By Robert Mezey



Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,

Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,

The crone implacable. At last he shivered,

Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped

In a world from which there is but one escape

And that forestalled now almost ninety years.

In such a scene as he himself might shape,

The maker of a thousand songs appears.



From this it follows, all the ironies

Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow

The way of things, the suffering one sees,

The many cups of bitterness he must swallow

Before he is permitted to be gone

Where he was headed in that early dawn.



Robert Mezey