O, brother, I have seen this yew-tree smoke, Spring after spring, for half a hundred years."
It will be seen, in the later Poem, how a comparison with the gloomy yew has been modified.
"Sorrow, cruel fellowship," from which he cannot disengage himself, now reigns within him, and distorts with "lying lip"[7] all Nature and her beneficent workings; making these seem to have no purpose or end. All which is but an echo of his own dark feelings. Shall he then believe this false guide--
"Embrace her as my natural good; Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind?"
reject, and turn away from the impostures of a sorrowing imagination?
In sleep there is no struggle of the will; and he communes with his own heart, which is beating so low; a condition that must be caused by a sense of "something lost."
"Break," he says, still addressing his heart, but in metaphor;
"Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, That grief hath shaken into frost."
This must refer to the scientific fact, that water can be lowered in temperature below the freezing point, without solidifying; but it expands at once into ice if disturbed; and the suddenness of the expansion breaks the containing vessel.
Clouds of undefined trouble, such as "dreams are made of," pass "below the darken'd eyes," that is, figure themselves on the brain under the eyelids; but on awaking, the will reasserts its power, and protests against the folly of such mourning. He would therefore dismiss the phantom, Sorrow.
He sometimes hesitates, as at something half sinful, when giving expression to his sadness; because words at best only partially declare what the Soul feels; just as outward Nature cannot fully reveal the inner life.
But "after all" words act like narcotics, and numb pain: so, as if putting on "weeds," the garb of mourning, he will wrap himself over in words; though these, like coarse clothes on the body, give no more than an outline of his "large grief."
The "common" expressions of sympathy with our trouble are very "commonplace"--
A friend asks, "Why grieve?" "Other friends remain;" "Loss is common to the race;" as Hamlet's mother says, "All that live must die." Is this comfort? rather the contrary. We know it is so--