So soon grown old! hast thou been six years dead? <br />Poor earth, once by my Love inhabited! <br />And must I live to calculate the time <br />To which thy blooming youth could never climbe, <br />But fell in the ascent! yet have not I <br />Studi'd enough thy losses history. <br />How happy were mankind if Death's strict lawes <br />Consum'd our lamentations like the cause! <br />Or that our grief turning to dust might end <br />With the dissolved body of a friend! <br />But sacred Heaven! O how just thou art <br />In stamping deaths impression on that heart <br />Which through thy favours would grow insolent, <br />Were it not physick't by sharp discontent. <br />If then it stand resolv'd in thy decree <br />That still I must doom'd to a Desart be <br />Sprung out of my lone thoughts, which know no path <br />But what my own misfortune beaten hath: <br />If thou wilt bind me living to a coarse, <br />And I must slowly waste; I then of force <br />Stoop to thy great appointment, and obey <br />That will which nought avail me to gainsay. <br />For whil'st in sorrowes Maze I wander on, <br />I do but follow lifes vocation. <br />Sure we were made to grieve: at our first birth <br />With cries we took possession of the earth; <br />And though the lucky man reputed be <br />Fortunes adopted son, yet onely he <br />Is Natures true born child, who summes his years <br />(Like me) with no Arithmetick but tears.<br /><br />Henry King<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/athe-anniverse-an-elegy/
