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 builds this poem on a quiet, devastating idea: the worst griefs aren't the obvious ones like silence or being unloved, but the near misses. He sets up that contrast plainly in the opening stanza, then spends the rest of the poem proving it. The central image is musical and exact — losing the perfect song "by a half-tone," missing the key by the smallest margin. That precision makes the failure sting more than a total miss would. The same logic carries into love, where he distinguishes youthful passion from something steadier, a love that offers "truth" instead of vanity, and shows how almost reaching it is its own kind of curse. The closing stanza lands the whole argument: we measure our lives not by what we achieve but by what barely eluded us. That's a very modern ache — the near-win, the almost-right draft, the relationship that was close but not quite — which is why the poem still feels current.
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