Their fronded palms in air:
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."

No philosophical treatise can interpret bereavement as the great poets
have interpreted it. The mystery of sorrow, the bewilderment it causes,
the wonder whether there is any God or any good, the silence that is the
only answer to our call for help, the tumult of emotion, the strange
perplexity of mind, the dull despair, the inexplicable paralysis of
feeling, intermingling in one wholly inconsistent and incongruous
experience: where, in all the literature of Philosophy can we find such
an exposition and echo and interpretation of this experience as in that
great Hebrew epic--the Book of Job? And where in all the literature of
Philosophy can we find such interpreters of the two great comforters of
the soul, faith and hope, as one finds in the poets? They do not argue;
they simply sing. And, as a note struck upon one of a chime of bells
will set the neighboring bell vibrating, so the strong note of faith and
hope sounded by the poet, sets a like note vibrating in the mourner's
heart. The mystery is not solved, but the silence is broken. First we
listen to the poet, then we listen to the same song sung in our own
hearts,--the same, for it is God who has sung to him and who sings to
us. And when the bereaved has found God, he has found light in his
darkness, peace in his tempest, a ray in his night.

"As a child,
Whose song-bird seeks the wood forevermore,
Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth;
Till, sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,
He sleep the faster that he wept before."