You would have understood me, had you waited;
I could have loved you, dear! as well as he:
Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated
Always to disagree.
What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid.
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,
Shall I reproach you, dead?
Nay, let this earth, your portion, likewise cover
All the old anger, setting us apart:
Always, in all, in truth was I your lover;
Always, I held your heart.
I have met other women who were tender,
As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare.
Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender,
I who had found you fair?
Had we been patient, dear! ah, had you waited,
I had fought death for you, better than he:
But from the very first, dear! we were fated
Always to disagree.
Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses
Love that in life was not to be our part:
On your low lying mound between the roses,
Sadly I cast my heart.
I would not waken you: nay! this is fitter;
Death and the darkness give you unto me;
Here we who loved so, were so cold and bitter,
Hardly can disagree.
"_A. E._"
(_George William Russell_)
At Durgan, a tiny town in the north of Ireland, George William Russell
was born in 1867. He moved to Dublin when he was 10 years old and, as
a young man, helped to form the group that gave rise to the Irish
Renascence--the group of which William Butler Yeats, Doctor Douglas
Hyde, Katharine Tynan and Lady Gregory were brilliant members. Besides
being a splendid mystical poet, "A. E." is a painter of note, a fiery
patriot, a distinguished sociologist, a public speaker, a student of
economics and one of the heads of the Irish Agricultural Association.
The best of his poetry is in _Homeward Songs by the Way_ (1894) and
_The Earth Breath and Other Poems_. Yeats has spoken of these poems as
"revealing in all things a kind of scented flame consuming them from
within."