I <br />Beholding youth and hope in mockery caught <br />From life; and mocking pulses that remain <br />When the soul's death of bodily death is fain; <br />Honour unknown, and honour known unsought; <br />And penury's sedulous self-torturing thought <br />On gold, whose master therewith buys his bane; <br />And longed-for woman longing all in vain <br />For lonely man with love's desire distraught; <br />And wealth, and strength, and power, and pleasantness, <br />Given unto bodies of whose souls men say, <br />None poor and weak, slavish and foul, as they:— <br />Beholding these things, I behold no less <br />The blushing morn and blushing eve confess <br />The shame that loads the intolerable day. <br /> <br />II <br />As some true chief of men, bowed down with stress <br />Of life's disastrous eld, on blossoming youth <br />May gaze, and murmur with self-pity and ruth,— <br />“Might I thy fruitless treasure but possess, <br />Such blessing of mine all coming years should bless;”— <br />Then sends one sigh forth to the unknown goal, <br />And bitterly feels breathe against his soul <br />The hour swift-winged of nearer nothingness:— <br />Even so the World's grey Soul to the green World <br />Perchance one hour must cry: “Woe's me, for whom <br />Inveteracy of ill portends the doom,— <br />Whose heart's old fire in shadow of shame is furl'd: <br />While thou even as of yore art journeying, <br />All soulless now, yet merry with the Spring!”<br /><br />Dante Gabriel Rossetti<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnets-xcii-xciii-the-sun-s-shame/
