Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NOT TO-MORROW!, by RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NOT TO-MORROW!, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: O terrible to-morrow! That will come
Last Line: While not to-morrow is as never more?
Alternate Author Name(s): Houghton, 1st Baron; Houghton, Lord
Subject(s): Future


O TERRIBLE To-morrow! that will come
On me, alone and far away from Her,
Who was my day, to-day, and every day:
To-morrow she will not be by my side,
And not to-morrow is as never more.

As the poor Soul, that images itself
Parted from God, its Father, and its Cause,
Finds in that very parting all its sin,
And in that very parting knows itself
Evil and reprobate, and will not hear
A single utterance of intrinsic hope:
So to my heart the world to-come is blank,
And not to-morrow is as never more.

I will not sound the possibilities:
I will not ask whether in some far time,
In some far order of the Universe,
In some far destination of myself,
We may not meet again? I only know
The burden of one thought that bears me down:
And that to-morrow is as never more.

Ever and Never -- foolish play of words --
Dancing before the finite mind of man:
Our Ever is a sweet successive dream
Of wavelets, over which the bounding heart
Goes forward 'mid the shoals and rocks of Time,
Until it crashes on the fronting shore:
Our Never is the Present without Hope,
And my next moment is as never more.

Let the serene Philosopher sit down,
Knowing that sorrow is the gift of God,
And bid the streams of consolation flow
Through the dim arid future: so have I
Striven in my time, and conquered in the end.
But how can it be good for me to lose
My better self, my moral sustenance,
One whom I followed in a heaven-ward path,
To which I now can see no other clue?
How can it make me better to be shorn
Of that within me that can claim to be
More than the crystal shining in the rock,
More than the blossom withering at my feet?
How can a man be wiser, if he lose
All sense that makes the difference between
This place and that, this circumstance and that,
Between to-morrow's life and never more?

I know to-morrow will be as to-day, --
Sun-rise -- bird's chirp -- the stolid hours roll on,
Careless of what they crush -- without a thought
That in the world there is a man the less,
A mind the less t' engender noble deeds,
A heart the less to beat for other men,
A soul the less to claim eternal life, --
For whom to-morrow is as never more.

What is the presence of continuous pain,
Some sharper and some better to be borne,
Calling out courage in the patient man,
Matched with this absence of the power to love,
This loss of that within which can stand up
In the broad face of Heaven, and say, "'Tis I,
Living and suffering for some secret end
Of the mysterious Master of us all:"
Is it that I have given away Myself,
And know not where to look for it again
In any corner of the field of Time,
While Not to-morrow is as Never more?





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