Grief and Loss

Lord! art Thou weary of my cry,
My unrepressed complaint?
The more Thy hand upholdeth me
The more I seem to faint.

Alas! had ever grief of man
Such discontent as mine?
Yet how I crave to have my will
Simply content with Thine!

Bear with me, patient God of Job!
Bear with Thy weakly child;
My thoughts are fevered with my grief,
My heart is going wild.

From some abyss these causeless bursts
Of stormy sorrow flow;
It seems as if nor outward thins:,
Nor inward, brought the woe.

All of itself it comes, and sweeps
The landmarks quite away;
And these sudden tempests mostly come
On the eve of a quiet day.

There is some change within my grief,
Some shifting of my cross:
What overweights me is not grief,
It is the sense of loss.

What was a grief is now a loss,
A stationary want,
An absence felt in every room,
In each familiar haunt.

My God! how petulant I am,
How hard to please in grief,
For ever making fresh complaint
Of what should be relief!

But, Lord! Thou lovest we should speak,
Nor silent bear our pain:
The look of Thy forbearing love
Allures us to complain.

Oh loss is grief's most joyless side,
Grief's least religious state:
'Tis sorrow most unreconciled,
Because most like to fate.

Loss is a sense upon whose nerve
Life's ceaseless weight must press,
A pain too dull and equable
To vary its distress.

Loss is a thing so multiplied,
So many-shaped a grief,
So echoing every sound of life,
That there is no relief.

I seemed to have him while I grieved;
At least grief was no void;
In some strange way the vehement woe
My sinking spirits buoyed.

Fresh grief can occupy itself
With its own recent smart;
It feeds itself on outward things,
And not on its own heart.

New sorrow never goads: it seems
To fill and occupy;
But I am goaded to despair
By this blind vacancy:

And then it is such calm despair,
Such a mute and -passive pain,
That they who love me smile, and say,
That I am myself again!

I move about, and do my work.
That old routine of yore;
But, if I seem to sorrow less,
It is to miss him more.

When I have missed him most all day,
I have him in my dreams;
And then how worse than the first loss
The dismal waking seems!

This sense of loss, oh can it last?
Or, if it lasts, be borne?
The extremity that comes at night
Has a worse extreme at morn.

My sorrow could defend itself,
Or at least could live apart;
But the loss intrudes from every side
On my defenceless heart.

The present is so like the past,
Yet so terribly unlike,
That all life's touches do not touch,
But cut and bruise and strike.

If it was more unbearable
So stormily to grieve,
The hopelessness of my great loss
Is harder to believe: -

Worse to believe, and yet, alas!
Worse to be borne as well,
Because it makes life felt to be
So quite impossible.

Is it, O Lord! that I too much
On creatures love have leaned?
Else why this void of all things now,
This pain of being weaned?

Sorrow by its own nature is
In league with self-deceit;
Its very grace improves its skill
More grace to counterfeit.

Sorrow indulged must always make
The grace within us less,
Man's sorrow at its best must be
A form of selfishness, -

The gracefulest of all self-loves,
But a self-worship still,
A waste of heart whose deepest depths
It is Thy right to fill.

Faith does not know of empty hearts
They should be full of Thee;
And to be full of Thee alone
Is their eternity.

All life is loss; for it delays
The vision of Thy Face:
Yet nothing, Lord! is lost to him
Who hath not lost Thy grace.