Two that could not have lived their single lives <br />As can some husbands and wives <br />Did something strange: they tensed their vocal cords <br />And attacked each other with silences and words <br />Like catapulted stones and arrowed knives. <br /> <br /> <br />Dawn was not yet; night is for loving or sleeping, <br />Sweet dreams or safekeeping; <br />Yet he of the wide brows that were used to laurel <br />And she, the famed for gentleness, must quarrel. <br />Furious both of them, and scared, and weeping. <br /> <br /> <br />How sleepers groan, twitch, wake to such a mood <br />Is not well understood, <br />Nor why two entities grown almost one <br />Should rend and murder trying to get undone, <br />With individual tigers in their blood. <br /> <br /> <br />She in terror fled from the marriage chamber <br />Circuiting the dark rooms like a string of amber <br />Round and round and back, <br />And would not light one lamp against the black, <br />And heard the clock that clanged: Remember, Remember. <br /> <br /> <br />And he must tread barefooted the dim lawn, <br />Soon he was up and gone; <br />High in the trees the night-mastered birds were crying <br />With fear upon their tongues, no singing nor flying <br />Which are their lovely attitudes by dawn. <br /> <br /> <br />Whether those bird-cries were of heaven or hell <br />There is no way to tell; <br />In the long ditch of darkness the man walked <br />Under the hackberry trees where the birds talked <br />With words too sad and strange to syllable.<br /><br />John Crowe Ransom<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/two-in-august/
