My grief Down to the day I knew you locks Its secret word in paradox: I who loved truth could not be true, Could only love the truth and glow With words of truth who loved it so, Even while I dishonored you. I who loved constancy was false, And heeded but in part the calls Of loveliness for love and you. I am but half of that I hoped, And that half hardly more than words I cheered my soul with as it groped: As from their bowers of rain the birds Sing feebly, pining for the sun. As I am all of this, by fate Lose what I could so well have won, Life leaves me half articulate, My failure, nature half-expressed, Or wholly hidden in my breast. Yes, dear, the secret of me lies Where words scarce come to analyze. Yet who knows why he is this or that? What moves, defeats him, works him ill? What blood ancestral of the bat Narrows his music to the shrill Squeak of a flitting thing that hunts For gnats, which never singing, fronts The full moon flooding down the vale, The perfect soul, the nightingale! You have wooed music all your life, And I have sought for love. I think My soul was marked, dear, by a wife Who loved a man immersed in drink, Who crushed her love which would not die. If this be true, my soul's great thirst Was blended with a fault accursed. My mother's love is my soul's cry. My father's vileness, lies and lusts, His cruel heart, inconstancy That kept my mother with the crusts Of life to gnaw, are in my blood. My rainbow wings I scarce can loose, Or if I free them, there's the mud That weighs and mars their use. You have wooed music. But suppose The hampered hours and poverty Broke down your spirit's harmony, Then if you found you could achieve The music in you, if you could But pick a pocket or deceive, Which would you call the greater good-- The music or a sin withstood? Suppose you passed a window where The violin of your despair Lay ready for your hands! At last You stole it as you hurried past, And hid it underneath your rags Until you reached your attic room, Then tuned the strings and burned the tags. And drew the bow till lyric fire Should all your thieving thoughts consume: In such case what is your desire-- The music or the violin? And what in such case is your sin? And if they caught you in your theft, Would you, just to be honest, dear, Forefront your thief-self as your deft And dominant genius, or the ear Which tortured you?