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.