467. Elegy on Thyrza

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788—1824)

  AND thou art dead, as young and fair

  As aught of mortal birth;

  And forms so soft and charms so rare

  Too soon return’d to Earth!

  Though Earth received them in her bed,

  And o’er the spot the crowd may tread

  In carelessness or mirth,

  There is an eye which could not brook

  A moment on that grave to look.

  I will not ask where thou liest low

  Nor gaze upon the spot;

  There flowers or weeds at will may grow

  So I behold them not:

  It is enough for me to prove

  That what I loved, and long must love

  Like common earth can rot;

  To me there needs no stone to tell

  ’Tis Nothing that I loved so well.

  Yet did I love thee to the last,

  As fervently as thou

  Who didst not change through all the past

  And canst not alter now.

  The love where Death has set his seal

  Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,

  Nor falsehood disavow:

  And, what were worse, thou canst not see

  Or wrong, or change, or fault in me.

  The better days of life were ours;

  The worst can be but mine:

  The sun that cheers, the storm that lours,

  Shall never more be thine.

  The silence of that dreamless sleep

  I envy now too much to weep;

  Nor need I to repine

  That all those charms have pass’d away

  I might have watch’d through long decay.

  The flower in ripen’d bloom unmatch’d

  Must fall the earliest prey;

  Though by no hand untimely snatch’d,

  The leaves must drop away.

  And yet it were a greater grief

  To watch it withering, leaf by leaf,

  Than see it pluck’d today;

  Since earthly eye but ill can bear

  To trace the change to foul from fair.

  I know not if I could have borne

  To see thy beauties fade;

  The night that follow’d such a morn

  Had worn a deeper shade:

  Thy day without a cloud hath past,

  And thou wert lovely to the last,

  Extinguish’d, not decay’d;

  As stars that shoot along the sky

  Shine brightest as they fall from high.

  As once I wept, if I could weep,

  My tears might well be shed

  To think I was not near, to keep

  One vigil o’er thy bed:

  To gaze, how fondly! on thy face,

  To fold thee in a faint embrace,

  Uphold thy drooping head;

  And show that love, however vain,

  Nor thou nor I can feel again.

  Yet how much less it were to gain,

  Though thou hast left me free,

  The loveliest things that still remain

  Than thus remember thee!

  The all of thine that cannot die

  Through dark and dread Eternity

  Returns again to me,

  And more thy buried love endears

  Than aught except its living years.