ut I write, with the wretched bravado of distance,
What you must read unmoved by the pity too far for entreaty.

II.

Well, I could never have loved him, but when he sought me and
asked me,--
When to the men that offered their lives, the love of a woman
Seemed so little to give!--I promised the love that he asked me,
Sent him to war with my kiss on his lips, and thought him my hero.
Afterward came the doubt, and out of long question, self-knowledge,--
Came that great defeat, and the heart of the nation was withered;
Mine leaped high with the awful relief won of death. But the
horror,
Then, of the crime that was wrought in that guilty moment of
rapture,--
Guilty as if my will had winged the bullet that struck him,--
Clung to me day and night, and dreaming I saw him forever,
Looking through battle-smoke with sorrowful eyes of upbraiding,
Or, in the moonlight lying gray, or dimly approaching,
Holding toward me his arms, that still held nearer and nearer,
Folded about me at last ... and I would I had died in the fever!--
Better then than now, and better than ever hereafter!

III.

Weary as some illusion of fever to me was the ocean--
Storm-swept, scourged with bitter rains, and wandering always
Onward from sky to sky with endless processions of surges,
Knowing not life nor death, but since the light was, the first day,
Only enduring unrest till the darkness possess it, the last day.
Over its desolate depths we voyaged away from all living:
All the world behind us waned into vaguest remoteness;
Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like that broken remembrance
Of the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit,--the trouble
Of a bewildered brain, or the touch of the Hand that created,--
And when the ocean ceased at last like a faded illusion,
Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld and of sadness.
Naught but the dark in my soul remained to me constant and real,
Growing and taking the thoughts bereft of happier uses,
Blotting all sense of lapse from the days that with swift iteration
Were and were not. They fable the bright days the fleetest:
These that had nothing to give, that had nothing to bring or to
promise,
Went as one day alone. For me was no alternation
Save from my dull despair to wild and reckless rebellion,
When the regret for my sin was turned to ruthless self-pity--
When I hated him whose love