"The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love."

asked the heaven of stars
What I should give my love — It answered me with silence,
Silence above.
I asked the darkened sea
Down where the fishers go — It answered me with silence,
Silence below.
Oh, I could give him weeping,
Or I could give him song — But how can I give silence,
My whole life long?

This silence is my companion now.
I ask: <i>of what did my soul die?</i>
and the silence answers

<i>if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?</i>

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.

"How long ago did she die, Wyatt?" Morgan pressed. "Is it nine years now?"
"Eight," Wyatt said, halfway between stubborn and sad. "I promised to love her all my life, Morg. I meant to keep my word."
That shut Morgan up, but Doc's eyes opened and he gazed at Wyatt for a long time. "What?" Wyatt asked.
"That is your ghost life, Wyatt," Doc told him, and closed his eyes again. "That is the life you might have had. This is the life you've got."

"Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? — -"On death

"The Poet Asks His Love to Write"

Visceral love, living death,
in vain, I wait your written word,
and consider, with the flower that withers,
I wish to lose you, if I have to live without self.

The air is undying: the inert rock
neither knows shadow, nor evades it.
And the heart, inside, has no use
for the honeyed frost the moon pours.

But I endured you: ripped open my veins,
a tiger, a dove, over your waist,
in a duel of teeth and lilies.

So fill my madness with speech,
or let me live in my calm
night of the soul, darkened for ever.

With duller steel than the Perséan sword
They cut away no formless monster's head,
But one, whose gentleness did well accord
With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
If Love impersonate was ever dead,
Pale Isabella kiss'd it, and low moan'd.
'Twas love; cold, — dead indeed, but not dethroned.

He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Oh, love that lives its life with laughter Or love that lives its life with tears Can die — but love that is never spoken Goes like a ghost through the winding years. . .

"Well, she's not responding to my advances," he observed more brightly than he felt, "so she must be dead."
"Or she's a woman of good taste and sense."

Death! mysterious, ill-visaged friend of weak humanity! Why alone of all mortals have you cast me from your sheltering fold? Oh, for the peace of the grave! the deep silence of the iron-bound tomb! that thought would cease to work in my brain, and my heart beat no more with emotions varied only by new forms of sadness!

"MY LOVER died a century ago,
Her dear heart stricken by my sland'rous breath,
Wherefore the Gods forbade that I should know
The peace of death.
Men pass my grave, and say, "'Twere well to sleep,
Like such an one, amid the uncaring dead!"
How should they know the vigils that I keep,
The tears I shed?
Upon the grave, I count with lifeless breath,
Each night, each year, the flowers that bloom and die,
Deeming the leaves, that fall to dreamless death,
More blest than I.
'Twas just last year — - I heard two lovers pass
So near, I caught the tender words he said:
To-night the rain-drenched breezes sway the grass
; Above his head.
That night full envious of his life was I,
That youth and love should stand at his behest;
To-night, I envy him, that he should lie
At utter rest."