Below in the dark street
There is a tap of feet,
I rise and angrily meditate
How often I have let of late
This thought of death come over me.
How often I will sit and backward trace
The deathly history of the human race,
The ripples of men who chattered and were still,
Known and unknown, older and older, until
Before man's birth I fall, shivering and aghast
Through a hole in the bottom of the remotest past;
Till painfully my spirit throws
Her giddiness off; and then as soon
As I recover and try to think again,
Life seems like death; and all my body grows
Icily cold, and all my brain
Cold as the jagged craters of the moon....
And I wonder is it not strange that I
Who thus have heard eternity's black laugh
And felt its freezing breath,
Should sometimes shut it out from memory
So as to play quite prettily with death,
And turn an easy epitaph?
I can hear a voice whispering in my brain:
"Why this is the old futility again!
Criminal! day by day
Your own life is ebbing swiftly away.
And what have you done with it,
Except to become a maudlin hypocrite?"
Yes, I know, I know;
One should not think of death or the dead overmuch; but one's
mind's made so
That at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death,
And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breath
Is clouded in winter's air,
And all the faith one may have
Lies useless and dead as a body in the grave.