Sonnet XXIII: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

This pale hymn's the anthem of a wasted
and silent life and of the fallow years
stretching out before me, still untasted,
past the horizon. Following my ears,
my reluctant fingers kiss the graying
ivory-inspired keys. I'm playing
an instrument they put there and forgot.
Now never, never will my erstwhile thought
go from me, and never will I proffer
my question; never will I breathe new air.
This hymn, this pallid hymn is all I share
with the world, the last farewell I offer
with voice and fingers to those schemes:
my inconvenient, now-abandoned dreams.