There crossed the moor from the town afar,
In kirtle of white and cinnabar,
A wanderer on that plain of tears,
Bowed with a burden not of the years,
As one that goeth sorrowing
For many an unforgotten thing.
To the crystal well as the sun drew low
There came that harridan of woe.
She stooped to drink; I heard her cry:
"Ah, God, how tired out am I!
"I called him by the dearest name
A girl may call; I have my shame.
"'Yet death is crueller than life,'
Once they said, 'for all the strife.'
"And so I lived; but the wild will,
Broken and bitter, drives to ill.
"And now I know, what no one saith,
That love is crueller than death.
"How I did love him! Is love too high,
My God, for such lost folk as I?"
Her tears went down to the grass by the well,
In that passion of grief, and where they fell
Windflowers trembled pale and white.
A craven I crept away from the sight;
And turned me home to St. Louis' Hall,
Where the sunflowers burn by the eastern wall.
The vesper frankincense that day
Rose to the rafters and melted away,
And was no more than a cloud that stirs
Among the spires of Norway firs.
And I said, "The holy solitude
Of the hoary crypt and the wild green wood
"Are one to the God I have never known,
Whose kingdom has neither bourn nor throne.
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