Midnight Lamentation
Midnight Lamentation
Original Text
Strange Meetings: Poems By Harold Monro (Wiltshire: Laurel Books, 2003): 105-106.
1When you and I go down
2Breathless and cold,
3Our faces both worn back
4To earthly mould,
5How lonely we shall be!
6What shall we do,
7You without me,
8I without you?
9I cannot bear the thought
10You, first, may die,
11Nor of how you will weep,
12Should I.
13We are too much alone;
14What can we do
15To make our bodies one:
16You, me; I, you?
17We are most nearly born
18Of one same kind;
19We have the same delight,
20The same true mind.
21Must we then part, we part;
22Is there no way
23To keep a beating heart,
24And light of day?
25I could now rise and run
26Through street on street
27To where you are breathing–you,
28That we might meet,
29And that your living voice
30Might sound above
31Fear, and we two rejoice
32Within our love.
33How frail the body is,
34And we are made
35As only in decay
36To lean and fade.
37I think too much of death;
38There is a gloom
39When I can’t hear your breath
40Calm in some room.
41O, but how suddenly
42Either may droop;
43Countenance be so white,
44Body stoop.
45Then there may be a place
46Where fading flowers
47Drop on a lifeless face
48Through weeping hours.
49Is then nothing safe?
50Can we not find
51Some everlasting life
52In our one mind?
53I feel it like disgrace
54Only to understand
55Your spirit through your word,
56Or by your hand.
57I cannot find a way
58Through love and through;
59I cannot reach beyond
60Body, to you.
61When you or I must go
62Down evermore,
63There’ll be no more to say
64–But a locked door.
Publication Start Year
1924
Publication Notes
Chapbook (Oct. 1924); Collected Poems, ed. Alida Monro, with prefaces by F. S. Flint and T. S. Eliot (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1933): 16-18
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2004
Rhyme
Form