no lifting this seal this despair. "When it goes, 'tis like the distance On the look of death"The lines call up the image of the stare in the eyes of a dead man, not focused, but fixed on the distance. Also, "distance" suggests the awful distance between the living and the deadpart of the implicit content of the mood. Notice that the slanted ray and the mood are still with us here, but are also going. The final remarkable image reiterates the components of the hour and the moodoppressiveness, solemnity, stillness, and death. But it hints also at reliefhopes that there will soon be a "distance" between the poet and her experience....
