The Daily Phoenix

A Mother's Wail,
BY HENRY TIMROD.
My babe! my babe! my only babe!
My single rose-bud in a crown of thorns!
My lamp that in that narrow hut of life,
Whence I looked forth upon a night of storm,
Burned with the lustre of the moon and stars!
My babe! my tiny babe! my only babe!
Behold, the bud is gone! the thorns remain!
My lamp has fallen from its niche in me!
Earth drinks the fragrant flame, and I am left
Forever and forever, in the dark!
My babe! my babe! my own and only babe!
Where art thou now? If somewhere in the sky
An angel holds thee in his radiant arms,
I challenge him to clasp thy tender form
With half the fervor of a mother's love.
Forgive me, Lord! forgive my reckless grief;
Forgive that this rebel, selfish heart
Would almost make me jealous for my child
Though my own lap enthroned him;
Lord, thou hast so many such! I had but one.
Oh! yet once more, my babe, to hear thy cry!
Oh! yet once more, my babe! to see thy smile!
Oh! yet once more to feel against my breast
Those cool soft hands, that warm, wet eager mouth,
With the sweet sharpness of its budding pearls.
But it must never, never more be mine,
To mark the growing meaning in thine eyes,
To watch thy soul unfolding leaf by leaf,
Or catch, with ever fresh surprise and joy,
Thy dawning recognitions of the world.
Three different shadows of thyself, my babe,
Change with each other while I weep. The first,
The sweetest, though not least fraught with pain,
Clings like my loving babe around my neck,
Or purrs and murmurs softly at my feet.
Another is a little mound of earth;
That comes the oftenest, darling.
In my dreams I see it beaten with the midnight rain,
Or chilled beneath the moon. Ah, what a couch
For that which I have shielded from a breath
That would not stir the violets on thy grave!
The third, my precious babe! the third, O Lord,
Is a fair cherub face beyond the stars,
Wearing the roses of a mystic bliss;
Yet, sometimes not unshadowed by a glance,
Turned earthward on a mother in her woe:
This is the vision, Lord, that I would keep
Before me always. But, alas! as yet
It is the dimmest and the rarest, too;
O touch my sight, or break the cloudy bars
That hide it, ere I madden where I kneel!