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THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Four Sonnets
By Dollie Radford
AT NIGHT
I
THE door is shut and barred upon my home,
My home that for so long has held my pain,
My home where all my tears were wept in vain,
And through the night in silence I am come ;
And my tired hope that all the day was dumb,
Has dropped, to perish as a wounded bird,
And through the night there is not any word
To save my hope whose wings grow cold and numb :
The darkness presses close on either hand,
Oh, I am out upon a driving sea
And strain and break to ride as I were free,
I drift on swelling tides that seek no strand
That never more may break upon the land,
The great unchanelled floods of misery.
II
The future holds one plot of barren earth
That my long grief shall water into flower,
And one unborn shall gather there for dower
A perfect blossom that shall have its birth
So rare I may not guess its shape or worth:
And there shall be one day, so full of joy,
Shall heal my shattered days with sweet employ,
Shall flood their wistful patience with its mirth ;
Such must there be, O God! who made the waste
So bare beneath the Heavens, who has spread
The stones upon the path that I must tread,
Who set the thorns through which I may not haste,
The bitter fruits which I must faint to taste,
Such must there be, O God! who art o'erhead.
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