Whispered Lines

A Poem

Illustration created by Midjourney

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Whispered Lines

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A book that begins with a poet’s first
Forays, the aged impatiently tend
To flip through the pages and glance o’er the
Footnotes, and whisper the lines near the end.

For life is too short and anguish too long,
And patience too strained when we fear, 
That each passing year is now losing a month,
And each passing month feels a year;

When each of our friends is already gone,
And most of our family is dead,
When much of our passion is wasted and spent,
And all of our fortune has fled;

Those poets whose verses enriched us in life,
Who comforted us like a friend,
Shall come with the angels to shepherd us home,
As we whisper their lines near the end.

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Today I was reading Victorian Parlour Poetry: an Annotated Anthology by Michael R. Turner. I decided to try my hand at a poem in a consciously archaic style. This poem was influenced by Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “Solitude”, which opens with the famous couplet: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you / Weep and you weep alone.”