Classic Poem

I

From sadness on to sadness, woe to woe,
Searching all depths of grief ineffable,
Those sighs of the Forsaken sink and swell,
And to a piercing shrillness, gathering, grow.
Now one by one, commingling now they flow:
Now in the dark they die, a piteous knell,
Lorn as the wail of exiled Israel,
Or Hagar weeping o'er her outcast. No —
Never hath loss external forced such sighs!
O ye with secret sins that inly bleed,
And drift from God, search out, if ye are wise,
Your unrepented infelicities:
And pray, whate'er the punishment decreed,
It prove not exile from your Maker's eyes.

II

Those sounds expiring on mine ear, mine eye
Was by their visual reflex strangely spelled;
A vision of the angels who rebelled
Still hung before me, through the yielding sky
Sinking on plumes outstretched imploringly;
Their tempter's hopes and theirs for ever quelled.
They sank, with hands upon their eyes close held,
And longed, methought, for death, yet could not die;
Down, ever down, a mournful pageant streaming
With the slow, ceaseless motion of a river,
Inwoven choirs to ruin blindly tending,
They sank. I wept as one who weeps while dreaming
To see them, host on host, by doom descending
Down the dim gulfs, for ever and for ever.