Coates Kinney

Misgiving

  Oh! can it be that this is all of life,
Betwixt a cradle and a coffin? Death!
Canst thou put out this spark of God, the soul,
Amid the humid ashes of the grave?
This marvelous existency! this dream,
Bounded each side by night, is there no morn
To be, that we may then remember it,
And know it a reality?—The grave
And nothing! Doubt, the horrid goblin, haunts
The gloomy chambers of my brain, and wails:

  “The grave and nothing! Love while yet the heart
Throbs warm ; and when the eye whose thrilling glance
Beams in among the shadows of thy spirit,
Like sunshine in the forest, shall grow dull
And vacant, and the lip’s red bloom grow pale,
Gaze then thy last, and kiss thy last; for love
Ends here forever! Rainbows hope may arch
In spans of beauty, that shall link thy years
One to an other gloriously, and tint
The clouds of sorrow; yet the last bright arch
Is broke by darkness; ay, it can not span
The gloomy valley of the shadow, death!
Take on the wings of thought, and soar away
Away most infinitely nothingward!
Away! till Earth gleam smaller than the eye
Of whom thou lovest—on! away! till thought
Grow crazy with infinity, alone
With the magnificent creation—on!
Where Fancy flaps her pennons full against
The battlement of Paradise, and soul
Deems to have traveled far enough to reach
The home of God: and yet eternity
Of matter, world, world, world, outstretches still
Beyond. No spirit greets thee in thy course;
Thou hearst no rustle of the wings of angels;
No whisper of intelligences here;
Naught here but matter, matter without end:
Thou art alone amid the silent wheels
Of the interminable mechanism.”

  Great God Almighty!—for THOU ART; else who
Did frame this endless, awful universe?—
Shall man, who loves, and hopes, and thinks, and feels,
And weeps, and shrieks for everlastingness,
Shall he end utterly here in the grave?
Hope no! in God’s large mercy, no! While all
Unconscious, careless things, incapable
Of being nothing, must forever be,
Shall mind, the only thing that knows to be,
Be nothing? Seems not like a God, to cause
It so. We know not; all is mystery:
Life’s awful problem—the solution, death!