The Little Review, October 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 7)

A white face like a dim sorrow, like a mute pain, drifting far away; the white face of a dead love searching in vain for me, in vain.

The day was a white monster, naked and bellowing; grinning after me with its buildings that were jagged rows of dirty teeth. There was no place to hide from my sorrow.

It lay in the sky that winked at me like a vast and blue and relentless eye. And it lay in the sun that burned like a golden grotesque. It lay in every laugh and in every beauty and in every little bird that lost itself over the water.

I felt the black flowers grow blacker and higher and I moved deeper into the blackness.

And then a sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished.

It floated away over the tops of the black flowers and I saw her white face moving from me like a pale bubble.

I saw the white face of a dead love moving beyond the soft shapes that swayed unseen; drifting away like a mute pain and searching in vain for me, in vain.

I ran, but there was no place to run; for the monster day ran after, glaring like a white torment, shouting and scampering after, and there was no place to hide.

Now the day was a white grave opened to me. Now it was a wide wave breaking over me.

And now it was a great bird, white-breasted and grey-pinioned, flying after me and after, bearing my sorrow in its blue beak; racing after me until its heart burst in the west and it sank, bleeding gorgeously across the sky.

And still I ran; but now the night came, running after, and there was no place to hide from my sorrow.

I fled in the streets before the darkness. But the stars found me and the trees loomed after me and the houselights followed me and the darkness wept around me—and they were my sorrow.

But there on the distant verge, where the night sinks exhausted into the blood-red arms of the white monster leaping over the world again, I fell; deep I fell.

Far into a hidden land where I lay hidden; hidden in a field of black flowers that were threaded with purple veins and green floating like thin worms about me.

It is the autumn come again, the autumn in whose wild sad treasures we once laughed; once when your hot hands reached out to me like a bright cry mocking the somber lisping of the twilight season.

Where are the songs I sang, the songs that leaped out of flame? Do they echo still in your listening ears? Do they fall like warm tears in your heart?

See the winds droop wearily into the trembling tree arms. See the street grows pale. A dying panoply drifts across the grey-girthed sky.

Ho, Life, I have still a song for you. Though you come whispering to me from the golden tombs of youth, from the scarlet graves of love, I will make of the lament you bring me—music. I will make of the dull tears you bring me—lyrics. I will clothe the grey ghosts of sorrow in rich trappings.

For it is only she who hath died. It is only she whom I loved with all my soul. Though my heart scatter tears over the dark day they are the tears of plenty. For her death hath enriched me.

For the autumn is come again speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the trees and to me things I have never heard before; things that her white breasts never told me; things that her burning lips never said to me; wild, sad things that the flame from whence my songs once leaped never held for me.