Living

A Mood

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich 1836–1907

From The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics (1899)

Living

A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness--
Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness;
A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence;
A tense of longing, or of loss, in some foregone existence;
A subtle hurt that never pen has writ nor tongue has spoken--
Such hurt perchance as Nature feels when a blossomed bough is broken.

MLA

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. “A Mood.” Poetry Codex, poetrycodex.com/poem/aldrich_tb/6/.

Chicago

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. “A Mood.” Poetry Codex. https://poetrycodex.com/poem/aldrich_tb/6/.

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