THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE
I
Partly to think, more to be left alone
George Annandale said something to his friends
A. word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gaze and went upstairs;
And there, in the one room that he could call
His own, he found a sort of meaningless
Annoyance in the mute familiar things
That filled it; for the grate's monotonous gleam
Was not the gleam that he had known before,
The books were not the books that used to be,
The place was not the place. There was a lack
Of something; and the certitude of death
Itself, as with a furtive questioning,
Hovered, and he could not yet understand.
He knew that she was gone there was no need
Of any argued proof to tell him that,
For they had buried her that afternoon,
Under the leaves and snow; and still there was
A doubt, a pitiless doubt a plunging doubt,
That struck him, and upstartled when it struck,
The vision, the old thought in him. There was
A lack, and one that wrenched him; but it was
Not that not that. There was a present sense
Of something indeterminably near
The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness
That would not be foreboding. And if not,
What then? or was it anything at all?
Yes, it was something it was everything
But what was everything? or anything?
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