The Widow

She hath no children, and no heart
In all our hurrying anxious life;
She sits beyond our ken apart,
Unmoved, unconscious of our strife;
Shipwrecked beyond these coasts of ours,
On some sad island full of flowers
Where nothing moves but memory;
Where no one lives but only he;
And all we others barely seem
The phantom figures of a dream
One dreams and says, "It cannot be!"

If sometimes when we talk with her
Those absent eyes light up awhile
And her set lips consent to stir
In the beginning of a smile,
It is not of our world nor us
But some remembrance tremulous,
Some sweet "Ten years ago to-day!"
Or haply, if a sudden ray
Set all her window in a glow,
She thinks: "'Twill make the roses blow
I planted at his feet to-day."

His tomb is all her garden-plot,
And rain or sunshine find her there.
She plants her blue forget-me-not
With hands but half unclasped from prayer;
Her loving mercies overbrim
O'er all the tombs that neighbour him;
On each she sets a dewy-pearled
Sweet pink or fernlet fresh-uncurled;
She plucks the withering violets;
And here if anywhere forgets
The emptiness of all the world.

Here, where she used to sob for hours,
Her deep fidelity unchanged
Hath found a calm that is not ours,
A peace exalted and estranged.
Here in the long light summer weather
She brings the books they chose together
And reads the verse he liked the most;
And here, as softly as a ghost,
Comes gliding through the winter gloom
To say her prayer beside the tomb
Of him she loves and never lost.