Suggested by Chopin's Funeral March.
I.
In the grey cathedral,
In the aisles of twilight,
Wails an awful music,
Whelming my drowned spirit
Fathom-deep in woe.
The hoar stone of ages
Palpitates disaster,
Breathes aware with sorrow,
Weighs me down to death!
All the immense wan spaces
Pregnant with dead faces,
Cold, carven forms arise!
And grey walls bring forth!
Vasty vans of darkness,
Swordsweeps of desolation,
Hound me to dim death!
Born from the deep ocean
Of sounding mystery,
In the ghostly forest
Of colossal pillars
Grows a dread procession:
Tramp! tramp! tramp!
Phantoms vast, sepulchral,
With dim downward eyes,
Move where yawns a dreary
Fathomless abyss.
What do they bear? they bear him,
My All, my Heart, my Heaven!
They let him fall therein!
Fall! fall! fall!
Fall ever in the abyss!
And my soul wails over,
Yearns to him in vain!
Cruel world! O cruel spirit
Of the world, with ne'er a heart!
All in vain I moan imploring;
Sleep! sleep! sleep!
II.
In the grey cathedral
Dawn red rays of morning,
And a sweet low music
Lifts me from the grave.
My dead pulses flutter,
As in spring the leaflet,
Or young flower awaking,
Wooed by the warm South …
… A calm saint on a pinnacle
Smiles in the day-dawn;
Monumental marble
With warm life-blood glows,
Sweet small singers warble
"Live! live! live!"
And lo! a rush of angels,
A cloud of spirits bright
From soft sun-rays of opal,
Woven to nests of light,
Among celestial branchings
Of the embowered height,
Bear me back my darling,
Smiling, rosed, alive,
Alive! alive! alive!
They only meant to scare me,
All was but in play;
The dismal shades were angels
From my Father's day;
Our Father knows why we must weep;
He wipes our tears away.
But if a hair might perish
From his sweet tendrilled head,
God would be the devil,
Love and Truth were dead,
Man a maniac, mooning
A moment plausibly,
Joy an idiot fooling,
And life Death's leprosy!
No! no! no!
An Eye rules the wild sea
Of human misery!