Why is it, as I enter at last the panelled room,
And pause, having opened the door,
And turning my eyes from wall to wall in the gloom
Find all as it was before,—

Something, a slow, grave, passionless wave of grief,
So whelms me in silence there,
That I listen, like one who loses his only belief,
In vain to the voiceless air?

Did I expect, in my absence, that you had come—
You, or a sign from you—
To lend a voice to a beauty that else was dumb?
But alas, there is nothing new,

The room is the same, the same, there has been no change,
The table, the chairs are the same,
Nothing has altered, nothing is singing and strange,
No hover of light or flame;

And the walls have not, as in an illusion of spring,
Blossomed, nor the oaken chair
Put forth pale leaves, nor is there a bird to sing
In the mystically widened air.

Yet if you had come, and stood for an instant dreaming,
And thought my name and gone,
Leaving behind you hardly a stir of seeming,
I should no less have known;

For this would have been no longer the hated room
Whose walls imprison me now,
But the infinite heavens, and one white bough in bloom,
And a bird to sing on the bough.