What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph---
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river *simile
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily *change of tone
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale, *evoking a tranquil image
Not like a pewit that returns to wail *has a distinctive “pee-wit” call
For something it has lost, but like a dove *symbolic of peace/ Biblical Allusion
That slants unswerving to its home and love. * sanctuary and inner peace
There I find my rest, as through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me: Beauty is there.
The tone of this poem is initially despondent and self-pitying, describing a soul that can find
no solace in the world. The speaker imagines his own epitaph to read that he was unloved
and loved nobody. He quickly follows this up by describing such thoughts as a “whim” which
immediately tells us that the thought-process of the speaker fluctuates between
despondency and a lighter mood as this melancholic mood so quickly “wearied”
The speaker compares himself to a “river/ At the fall of evening” which initially reflects his
melancholic state of mind as it has not had the benefit of the sun’s warmth but it soon
becomes clear that the speaker’s affinity with the natural world is what brings him solace in
this world. This appreciation of and connection to the natural world is a motif that runs
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph---
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river *simile
At fall of evening while it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily *change of tone
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale, *evoking a tranquil image
Not like a pewit that returns to wail *has a distinctive “pee-wit” call
For something it has lost, but like a dove *symbolic of peace/ Biblical Allusion
That slants unswerving to its home and love. * sanctuary and inner peace
There I find my rest, as through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me: Beauty is there.
The tone of this poem is initially despondent and self-pitying, describing a soul that can find
no solace in the world. The speaker imagines his own epitaph to read that he was unloved
and loved nobody. He quickly follows this up by describing such thoughts as a “whim” which
immediately tells us that the thought-process of the speaker fluctuates between
despondency and a lighter mood as this melancholic mood so quickly “wearied”
The speaker compares himself to a “river/ At the fall of evening” which initially reflects his
melancholic state of mind as it has not had the benefit of the sun’s warmth but it soon
becomes clear that the speaker’s affinity with the natural world is what brings him solace in
this world. This appreciation of and connection to the natural world is a motif that runs
