A Last Word

Oh, for some cup of consummating might,     Filled with life's kind conclusion, lost in night!     A wine of darkness, that with death shall cure     This sickness called existence! Oh to find     Surcease of sorrow! quiet for the mind,     An end of thought in something dark and sure!     Mandrake and hellebore, or poison pure!     Some drug of death, wherein there are no dreams!     No more, no more, with patience, to endure     The wrongs of life, the hate of men, it seems;     Or wealth's authority, tyranny of time,     And lamentations and the boasts of man!     To hear no more the wild complaints of toil,     And struggling merit, that, unknown, must starve:     To see no more life's disregard for Art!     Oh God! to know no longer anything!     Nor good, nor evil, or what either means!     Nor hear the changing tides of customs roll     On the dark shores of Time! No more to hear     The stream of Life that furies on the shoals     Of hard necessity! No more to see     The unavailing battle waged of Need     Against adversity! Merely to lie, at last,     Pulseless and still, at peace beneath the sod!     To think and dream no more! no more to hope!     At rest at last! at last at peace and rest,     Clasped by some kind tree's gnarled arm of root     Bearing me upward in its large embrace     To gentler things and fairer clouds and winds,     And stars and sun and moon! To undergo     The change the great trees know when Spring comes in     With shoutings and rejoicings of the rain,     To swiftly rise an atom in a host,     The myriad army of the leaves; and stand     A handsbreadth nearer Heaven and what is God!     To pulse in sap that beats unfevered in     The life we call inanimate the heart     Of some great tree. And so, unconsciously,     As sleeps a child, clasped in its mother's arm,     Be taken back, in amplitudes of grace,     To Nature's heart, and so be lost in her.