Explore "Christmas Night" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"IF I CANNOT SEE THEE PRESENT I WILL MOURN
THEE ABSENT, FOR THIS ALSO IS A PROOF OF LOVE"
"Thomas à Kempis"
We do not find Him on the difficult earth,
In surging human-kind,
In wayside death or accidental birth,
Or in the "march of mind."
Nature, her nests, her prey, the fed, the caught,
Hid Him so well, so well, / His steadfast secret there seems to our thought / Life's saddest miracle.
He's but conjectured in man's happiness, / Suspected in man's tears, / Or lurks beyond the long, discouraged guess, / Grown fainter through the years.
But absent, absent now? Ah, what is this, / Near as in child-birth bed, / Laid on our sorrowful hearts, close to a kiss? / A homeless childish head.