The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, A History of the Lyre, and Other Poems/Song 2

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

For works with similar titles, see Song (Letitia Elizabeth Landon).

SONG.

I pray thee let me weep to-night,
    'Tis rarely I am weeping;
My tears are buried in my heart,
    Like cave-lock'd fountains sleeping.

But oh, to-night, those words of thine
    Have brought the past before me;
And shadows of long-vanish'd years
    Are passing sadly o'er me.

The friends I loved in early youth,
    The faithless and forgetting,
Whom, though they were not worth my love,
    I cannot help regretting;—

My feelings, once the kind the warm,
    But now the hard, the frozen;
The errors I've too long pursued,
    The path I should have chosen;—

The hopes that are like failing lights
    Around my pathway dying;
The consciousness none others rise,
    Their vacant place supplying;—

The knowledge by experience taught,
    The useless, the repelling;
For what avails to know how false
    Is all the charmer's telling?

I would give worlds, could I believe
    One half that is profess'd me;
Affection! could I think it Thee,
    When Flattery has caress'd me?

I cannot bear to think of this,—
    Oh, leave me to my weeping;
A few tears for that grave my heart,
    Where hope in death is sleeping.