Grief

by Edith Wharton

　　ON immemorial altitudes august

　　Grief holds her high dominion. Bold the feet

　　That climb unblenching to that stern retreat

　　Whence, looking down, man knows himself but dust.

　　There lie the mightiest passions, earthward thrust

　　Beneath her regnant footstool, and there meet

　　Pale ghosts of buried longings that were sweet,

　　With many an abdicated "shall" and "must."

　　For there she rules omnipotent, whose will

　　Compels a mute acceptance of her chart;

　　Who holds the world, and lo! it cannot fill

　　Her mighty hand; who will be served apart

　　With uncommunicable rites, and still

　　Surrender of the undivided heart.

　　II

　　She holds the world within her mighty hand,

　　And lo! it is a toy for babes to toss,

　　And all its shining imagery but dross,

　　To those that in her awful presence stand;

　　As sun-confronting eagles o'er the land

　　That lies below, they send their gaze across

　　The common intervals of gain and loss,

　　And hope's infinitude without a strand.

　　But he who, on that lonely eminence,

　　Watches too long the whirling of the spheres

　　Through dim eternities, descending thence

　　The voices of his kind no longer hears,

　　And, blinded by the spectacle immense,

　　Journeys alone through all the after years.