Eugenia Todd

E

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters

Have any of you, passers-by,

Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort?

Or a pain in the side that never quite left you?

Or a malignant growth that grew with time?

So that even in profoundest slumber

There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought

Of the tooth, the side, the growth?

Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition,

Or a blunder in life which mixed your life

Hopelessly to the end,

Will like a tooth, or a pain in the side,

Float through your dreams in the final sleep

Till perfect freedom from the earth-sphere

Comes to you as one who wakes

Healed and glad in the morning!

Rating:

Comment form:

Similar Poems:

Philomela by Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Hark! ah, the nightingale—
The tawny-throated!
Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark!—what pain!

O wanderer from a Grecian shore,
Still, after many years, in distant lands,
Still nourishing in thy bewilder'd brain
That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world pain—

Say, will it never heal?
And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and night,
And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the dew,

131

Rating:

Lincoln by Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz

Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—

This failure, this unwilling bridegroom,
This tricky lawyer full of black despair—

He grew a beard, becoming President,

145

Rating: