O the waiting in the watches of the night! <br />In the darkness, desolation, and contrition and affright; <br />The awful hush that holds us shut away from all delight: <br />The ever weary memory that ever weary goes <br />Recounting ever over every aching loss it knows-- <br />The ever weary eyelids gasping ever for repose-- <br />In the dreary, weary watches of the night! <br /> <br />Dark--stifling dark--the watches of the night! <br />With tingling nerves at tension, how the blackness flashes white <br />With spectral visitations smitten past the inner sight!-- <br />What shuddering sense of wrongs we've wrought <br />that may not be redressed-- <br />Of tears we did not brush away--of lips we left unpressed, <br />And hands that we let fall, with all their loyalty unguessed! <br />Ah! the empty, empty watches of the night! <br /> <br />What solace in the watches of the night?-- <br />What frailest staff of hope to stay--what faintest shaft of light? <br />Do we _dream_ and dare _believe_ it, that by never weight of right <br />Of our own poor weak deservings, we shall win the dawn at last-- <br />Our famished souls find freedom from this penance for the past, <br />In a faith that leaps and lightens from the gloom <br />that flees aghast-- <br />Shall we survive the watches of the night? <br /> <br />One leads us through the watches of the night-- <br />By the ceaseless intercession of our loved ones lost to sight <br />He is with us through all trials, in His mercy and His might;-- <br />With our mothers there about Him, all our sorrow disappears, <br />Till the silence of our sobbing is the prayer the Master hears, <br />And His hand is laid upon us with the tenderness of tears <br />In the waning of the watches of the night.<br /><br />James Whitcomb Riley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-watches-of-the-night/
