Tomorrow is a day of recompense of which the future is uncertain. Once again a surgeon’s cold steel will exorcise evil in the weakness of flesh. Hopeless to change what is written in blood of the innocent, breathless I shall wait for fate to be revealed. In the darkness of the night the landscape is barren except for the warm glow of the instinct of hope.
Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
'Tis nature's prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E'en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?
John Clare (1793-1864)
