Explore "Harlan Sewall" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You never understood, O unknown one, / Why it was I repaid / Your devoted friendship and delicate ministrations / First with diminished thanks, / Afterward by gradually withdrawing my presence from you, / So that I might not be compelled to thank you, / And then with silence which followed upon / Our final Separation.
You had cured my diseased soul. But to cure it / You saw my disease, you knew my secret, / And that is why I fled from you.
For though when our bodies rise from pain / We kiss forever the watchful hands / That gave us wormwood, while we shudder / For thinking of the wormwood, / A soul that's cured is a different matter, / For there we'd blot from memory / The soft-toned words, the searching eyes, / And stand forever oblivious, / Not so much of the sorrow itself / As of the hand that healed it.