Disillusionment and Lost Love

But who can live for long

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact.

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

The world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be any more.

Like love we don’t know where or why Like love we can’t compel or fly Like love we often weep Like love we seldom keep.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I’ve no more left of you.

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

When lovely woman stoops to folly 4 and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life.

Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later… some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love’s pleasure drives his love away, The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.

O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?

And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I!) To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair (We called her the woman who did not care) But the fool he called her his lady fair— (Even as you and I!)

We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung; And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth. God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.