But there is one severer. 
Stung by your forgivingness so great
Shall I forgive you then?—­
Basest of men
Would rise in bitterness and sting again. 
Not if you should forget
Could I forget: 
Or if remembering, myself could I forgive?

Never!  And yet such things have been,
And ills as dark forgiven or forgot. 
But in those black hours when the heart burns hot
And there’s no nerve that’s not
Quick with the sense of things unheard, unseen—­
A terrible voice that’s mine yet not mine cries,
“Can that Eternal Righteousness
Remembering forgive?”

SOME HURT THING

I came to you quietly when you were lying
  In perfect midnight sleep. 
Your dark soft hair was all about your pillow,
  So black upon the white. 
I could not see your face except the lovely
  Curve of the pale cheek;
Your head was bent as though your stirless slumber
  Was sea-like heavy and deep. 
The wind came gently in at the wide window,
  Shaking the candle-light
And shadows on the wall; and there was silence,
  Or sound but far and weak. 
By the bedside your daytime toys were gathered: 
  The bright bell-ringing wheel,
Dolls clad in violent yellow and vermilion,
  Strings of gay-coloured beads.... 
But you were far and far from these beside you,
  Entranced with other joys
In fresh fields, among other children running: 
  Your voice, I knew, must peal
Purely among their high unearthly voices
  Over green daisied meads,
While I stood watching your scarce-heaving slumber
  Beside your human toys——­
And heard, faint from the woods all through the night,
The cry of some hurt thing that moaned for light.

THE WAITS

Frost in the air and music in the air,
And the singing is sweet in the street. 
She wakes from a dream to a dream—­O hark! 
    The singing so faint in the dark.

The musicians come and stand at the door,
A fiddler and singers three,
And one with a bright lamp thrusts at the dark,
    And the music comes sudden—­O hark!

She hears the singing as sweet as a dream
And the fiddle that climbs to the sky,
With head ’neath the curtain she stares out—­O hark! 
    The music so strange in the dark.

She listens and looks and sees but the sky,
While the fiddle is sweet in the porch,
And she sings back into the singing dark
    Hark, herald angels, hark!

IN THE LANE

The birds return,
The blossom brightens again the cherry bough. 
The hedges are green again
In the airless lane,
And hedge and blossom and bird call, Now, now, now!

O birds, return! 
Who will care if the blossom die on the bough,
Or the hedge be bare again
In the screaming lane? 
For what they were these are not, are not now.