Sonnet Lxxxiv: Poem by George Henry Boker

Sweet, when thy brow becomes the haunted spot
Of Death's grim heralds, care and wasting pain,
And all my bitter prayers return again,
Outcasts of heaven whose pity heeds them not;
In desperate haste, by love and fear begot,
I ask of nature why she formed in vain
This fairest fabric of her subtle brain--
In vain, if subject to the common lot.
The hungry earth is dumb, a sullen moan
Sighs from the hollows of the breaking wave,
And the great winds awaken but to groan;
While through the cypress glints the ghostly stone,
Whose pallid finger, from the silent grave,
Points to a mystery solved in heaven alone.