The Shadow That is Born with Us

Julia Ward Howe

One said to me: reveal the untold grief

Thou holdest, treasured in the inmost deep;

I have experience that may counsel thee,

A heart to pity—ready eyes to weep—

I see the cruel furrows in thy face,

The cheek depressed, the wan and cheerless eye;

I ask thee wherefore—“’tis that I am sad”—

But wherefore sad?  Sit here, and tell me why.

I can but tell thee; I have tried to frame

The legendary sorrows of my youth;

Then wondering paused, as at a fiction strange;

I spoke in fables—deeper lay the truth.

I’ve made impatient efforts to uplift

In words, the weight that hung upon my soul;

Oh! senseless—while I battled with the air,

Here lay the burthen, undisturbed and whole.

Mine is no grief that helps itself with tears,

Or in wild sobbing passes from the breast;

Constant as Fate, inalienate as life,

‘Tis my employ of day, my nightly rest.

It is a strife that heeds no set of sun,

A discord daring and irresolute,

A weary business without Sabbath pause,

A problem ever endless to compute.

Nor hand of leech nor surgeon can avail

To heal the plague-spot, hopeless of relief,

The suicidal steel could reach it not;

I sometimes deem, myself is all my grief.

They say, my mother brought me forth in tears,

And fed me from a melancholy breast;

Thus while she sleeps, her sorrow lives in me,

A tie the envious grave has not supprest.

But Heaven that gave such matter to my life,

Denied not love of art, nor plastic skill;

I mould an angel from the somber mass,

That, deeply bronzine, is an angel still.

Content thee, then, the secret of my life

Not ev’n to Love’s true hearing may belong,

Only to His who set, to keep my lips,

His guardians twain, of Silence and of Song.

(1857)