Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

Poems of Sentiment: IV. Thought: Poetry: Books

Broken Music

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907)

I KNOW not in what fashion she was made,

Nor what her voice was, when she used to speak,

Nor if the silken lashes threw a shade

On wan or rosy cheek.

I picture her with sorrowful vague eyes

Illumed with such strange gleams of inner light

As linger in the drift of London skies

Ere twilight turns to night.

I know not; I conjecture. ’T was a girl

That with her own most gentle desperate hand

From out God’s mystic setting plucked life’s pearl—

’T is hard to understand.

So precious life is! Even to the old

The hours are as a miser’s coins, and she—

Within her hands lay youth’s unminted gold

And all felicity.

The winged impetuous spirit, the white flame

That was her soul once, whither has it flown?

Above her brow gray lichens blot her name

Upon the carven stone.

This is her Book of Verses—wren-like notes,

Shy franknesses, blind gropings, haunting fears;

At times across the chords abruptly floats

A mist of passionate tears.

A fragile lyre too tensely keyed and strung,

A broken music, weirdly incomplete:

Here a proud mind, self-baffled and self-stung,

Lies coiled in dark defeat.