Niobe

How like the sky she bends above her child,

One with the great horizon of her pain!

No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild,

No weeping cloud, no momentary rain,

Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief,

That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb.

She stoops in pity above the labouring earth,

Knowing how fond, how brief

Is all its hope, past, present, and to come,

She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth.

Through that fair face the whole dark universe

Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro’ one white flower;

And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse

The gods, but cannot die before their hour,

Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head

Bows over all earth’s graves. It was her cry

Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways

With children’s blood ran red.

Her silence towers to Silences on high;

And, in her face, the whole earth’s anguish prays.

It is the pity, the pity of human love

That strains her face, upturned to meet the doom,

And her deep bosom, like a snow-white dove

Frozen upon its nest, ne’er to resume

Its happy breathing o’er the golden brace

That she must shield till death. Death, death alone

Can break the anguished horror of that spell.

The sorrow on her face

Is sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone;

She knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell.

Ah, yet, her woman’s love, so vast, so tender,

Her woman’s body, hurt by every dart,

Braving the thunder, still, still hide the slender

Soft frightened child beneath her mighty heart.

She is all one mute immortal cry, one brief

Infinite pang of such victorious pain

That she transcends the heavens and bows them down!

The majesty of grief

Is hers, and her dominion must remain

Eternal. Grief alone can wear that crown.