Would I Were No More! Poem by William Billington

FROM worlds of bliss for ever cleft,
To know no hope, to feel no fear,
So sad and lonely, so bereft
Of all my doting heart held dear,
For me there now is nothing left
To cause a smile, or claim a tear;
The cup of joy, once brimming o'er,
Is broken! Would I were no more!

The green moss withers on the wall,
The trees their load of leaves have shed,
The Earth wears Autumn's funeral pall,
The fairest of the flowers are dead,
The skies have lost their lustre, all
The light of life has from me fled;
But Death, dark angel, shuns my door,
O would to Heaven I were no more!

Love sate on Ruin's broken sphere,
And smiled above the boiling brink
Of Passion; troth was held more dear
Than life; from death I did not shrink!
But fate hath chained my spirit here
To dust, with adamantine link;
My heart is calcined to the core!
O would to Heaven I were no more!

Through Life's bleak Wilderness of Care
With Sorrow hand in hand I go;
As Atlas once the world did bear,
Have I not borne a world of woe,
And wrestled long with dark Despair,
And hugged the fiend I could not throw?
But now my spirit, faint and frore,
Is weary! Would I were no more!