Explore "Sweet Hours" by Carmen Sylva on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To toss with fevered brain and throbbing pulses / Upon thy bed at night -- thine aching eyes, / Straining into the darkness, hot and weary, / Thy heart like lead, yet ever wildly bounding / Within thee, like a gun made loose in shipwreck, / That rolls from side to side, an unchained danger, / Thy pillows fire, thy couch a rack, whereon / Thy tortured limbs seem cords strung by the storm, / Thy thoughts a tangled skein, unclear, disordered, / And all the past that should have been forgotten / Rising up ghostly, in fantastic guise, / To make the present worse, to slay all hope, / To quench the beacon that till now has been / Thy only stay in night's deep gloom and horror! / This, O my soul! is Unrest, and thou knowest / Its misery but too well! All the old scars / Of former battles bleed once more within thee, / As if thy life were oozing, drop by drop.
And thou wert fain with trembling fingers seize / That foolish heart, and fling it in thy path / To trample under foot, or, further still, / Sink it in sea-depths, and then turn away / Calm and indifferent, deeming all were well / Were but its restlessness thus stilled, and thou / Free from its tumult.