Explore "Forbidden Speech" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The passion you forbade my lips to utter / Will not be silenced. You must hear it in / The sullen thunders when they roll and mutter: / And when the tempest nears, with wail and din, / I know your calm forgetfulness is broken, / And to your heart you whisper, "He has spoken."
All nature understands and sympathises / With human passion. When the restless sea / Turns in its futile search for peace, and rises / To plead and to pursue, it pleads for me. / And with each desperate billow's anguished fretting. / Your heart must tell you, "He is not forgetting."
When unseen hands in lightning strokes are writing / Mysterious words upon a cloudy scroll, / Know that my pent-up passion is inditing / A cypher message for your woman's soul; / And when the lawless winds rush by you shrieking, / Let your heart say, "Now his despair is speaking."
Love comes, nor goes, at beck or call of reason, / Nor is love silent -- though it says no word; / By day or night, in any clime or season, / A dominating passion must be heard. / So shall you hear, through Junes and through Decembers, / The voice of Nature saying, "He remembers. "