Niobe

How like the sky she bends above her child,One with the great horizon of her pain!No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild,No weeping cloud, no momentary rain,Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief,That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb.She stoops in pity above the labouring earth,Knowing how fond, how briefIs all its hope, past, present, and to come,She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth.

Through that fair face the whole dark universeSpeaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro' one white flower;And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curseThe gods, but cannot die before their hour,Find utterance in her beauty. That fair headBows over all earth's graves. It was her cryMen heard in Rama when the twisted waysWith children's blood ran red!Her silence utters all the sea would sigh;And, in her face, the whole earth's anguish prays.

It is the pity, the pity of human loveThat strains her face, upturned to meet the doom,And her deep bosom, like a snow-white doveFrozen upon its nest, ne'er to resumeIts happy breathing o'er the golden braceWhose fostering was her death. Death, death aloneCan break the anguished horror of that spell!The sorrow on her faceIs sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone;She knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell.

Ah, yet, her woman's love, so vast, so tender;Her woman's body, hurt by every dart;Braving the thunder, still, still hide the slenderSoft frightened child beneath her mighty heart.She is all one mute immortal cry, one briefInfinite pang of such victorious painThat she transcends the heavens and bows them down!The majesty of griefIs hers, and her dominion must remainEternal. God nor man usurps that crown.