I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coursest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
***
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasped no more --
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
[She] is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
I don't mean to beat you up or wear you down with this. I'm just grieving in my own way, and part of my way is to emotionally disrobe, within the bounds of 21st-century decorum -- there are, I trust, some left -- on this stage. I'm doing the best I can. I'm as skeptical of therapists as I am of political handicappers, hence my best is just me and my way; just me and mine.
I do promise, however, that I shan't make a public or solipsistic profession of grief, as did so many Victorian mourners of a poetic mind (one of whom I so felicitously, I think, stole from this morning). Goodness, their chimney sweep or charwoman would exhaust a last, underpaid breath and the literary master would order another barrel of ink and fell another forest to pour forth a few more reams of bathos.
So bear with me, if you please. It's reader's choice, but not much from here.