A Secret
It is your secret and mine, love!
Ah, me! how the dreary rain
With a slow persistence, all day long
Dropped on the window-pane!
The chamber was weird with shadows
And dark with the deepening gloom
Where you in your royal womanhood,
Lay waiting for the tomb.
They had robed you all in white, love;
In your hair was a single rose—
A marble rose it might well have been
In its cold and still repose!
O, paler than yonder carven saint,
And calm as the angels are,
You seemed so near me, my beloved,
Yet were, alas, so far!
I do not know if I wept, love;
But my soul rose up and said—
“My heart shall speak unto her heart,
Though here she is lying—dead!
I will give her a last love-token
That shall be to her a sign
In the dark grave—or beyond it—
Of this deathless love of mine.”
So I sought me a little scroll, love;
And thereon, in eager haste,
Lest another’s eye should read them
Some mystic words I traced.
Then close in your claspèd fingers,
Close in your waxen hand,
I placed the scroll for an amulet,
Sure you would understand!
The secret is yours and mine, love!
Only we two may know
What words shine clear in the darkness,
Of your grave so green and low.
But if when we meet hereafter,
In the dawn of some fairer day,
You whisper those mystical words, love,
It is all I would have you say!