Explore "Our Loneliness" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There is no deeper grief than loneliness. / Our sharpest anguish at the death of friends / Is loneliness. Our agony of heart / When love has gone from us is loneliness. / The crying of a little child at night / In the big dark is crowding loneliness. / Slow death of woman on a Kansas farm; / The ache of those who think beyond their time; / Pain unassuaged of isolated lives,- / All this is loneliness.
Oh, we who are one body of one soul! / Great soul of man born into social form! / Should we not suffer at dismemberment? / A finger torn from brotherhood; an eye / Having no cause to see when set alone. / Our separation is the agony / Of uses unfulfilled-of thwarted law; / The forces of all nature throb and push, / Crying for their accustomed avenues; / And we, alone, have no excuse to be,- / No reason for our being. We are dead / Before we die, and know it in our hearts.