| |
| ERE on my bed my limbs I lay, | |
| It hath not been my use to pray | |
| With moving lips or bended knees; | |
| But silently, by slow degrees, | |
| My spirit I to Love compose, | 5 |
| In humble trust mine eyelids close, | |
| With reverential resignation, | |
| No wish conceived, no thought exprest, | |
| Only a sense of supplication; | |
| A sense o’er all my soul imprest | 10 |
| That I am weak, yet not unblest, | |
| Since in me, round me, everywhere | |
| Eternal Strength and Wisdom are. | |
| |
| But yester-night I pray’d aloud | |
| In anguish and in agony, | 15 |
| Up-starting from the fiendish crowd | |
| Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me; | |
| A lurid light, a trampling throng, | |
| Sense of intolerable wrong, | |
| And whom I scorned, those only strong! | 20 |
| Thirst of revenge, the powerless will | |
| Still baffled, and yet burning still! | |
| Desire with loathing strangely mixed | |
| On wild or hateful objects fixed. | |
| Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! | 25 |
| And shame and terror over all! | |
| Deeds to be hid which were not hid, | |
| Which all confused I could not know | |
| Whether I suffer’d, or I did: | |
| For all seem’d guilt, remorse or woe, | 30 |
| My own or others still the same | |
| Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame! | |
| |
| So two nights passed: the night’s dismay | |
| Saddened and stunned the coming day. | |
| Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me | 35 |
| Distemper’s worst calamity. | |
| The third night, when my own loud scream | |
| Had waked me from the fiendish dream, | |
| O’ercome with sufferings strange and wild, | |
| I wept as I had been a child: | 40 |
| And having thus by tears subdued | |
| My anguish to a milder mood, | |
| Such punishments, I said, were due | |
| To natures deepliest stained with sin: | |
| For aye entempesting anew, | 45 |
| The unfathomable hell within | |
| The horror of their deeds to view, | |
| To know and loathe, yet wish and do! | |
| Such griefs with such men well agree, | |
| But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? | 50 |
| To be beloved is all I need, | |
| And whom I love, I love indeed. | |
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