It may be misery not to sing at all, And to go silent through the brimming day; It may be misery never to be loved, But deeper griefs than these beset the way.
To sing the perfect song, And by a half-tone lost the key, There the potent sorrow, there the grief, The pale, sad staring of Life's Tragedy.
To have come near to the perfect love, Not the hot passion of untempered youth, But that which lies aside its vanity, And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth.
This, this indeed is to be accursed, For if we mortals love, or if we sing, We count our joys not by what we have, But by what kept us from that perfect thing.
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📖 About this poem
Dunbar's poem argues a quiet, unsettling point: the worst grief isn't silence or being unloved, but almost reaching perfection and missing it by a hair. He builds this through two parallel images — a singer who loses the "perfect song" by a single half-tone, and a lover who comes near true, mature love (not youthful heat, but honest, trusting devotion) without quite arriving. The music of the poem is deliberately measured, almost hymn-like, each stanza turning the screw a little tighter until the final quatrain delivers its sting: we measure our lives not by what we possess, but by the narrow margin that kept us from the ideal. That closing thought still resonates because it names something modern readers recognize instantly — the ache of the near-miss, the promotion just missed, the relationship almost right. Dunbar turns a small musical metaphor into a universal truth about longing and self-judgment.
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