I wonder if you know—you who are gone
So long that you have grown a mystery—
How Grief at first is such a verity,
He holds us fast from iron dawn to dawn;
Then, slackening his grasp, he lets us go,
Bearing some littleness of his old mood,
Some odor, sound, some look of fold or wood,—
You that are gone, I wonder if you know.
This day the hedge was loosing its spent white;
It stung me as with tears. What thing forgot,
Mixed with this custom of the countryside,
Had happened at some breaking of the light?
The bared briar was rememberèd—but not
This was the very weather that you died!