Death

    I

    The stream goes fast.
    When this that is the present is the past,
    'Twill be as all the other pasts have been,
    A failing hill, a daily dimming scene,
    A far strange port with foreign life astir
    The ship has left behind, the voyager
    Will never return to; no, nor see again,
    Though with a heart full of longing he may strain
    Back to project himself, and once more count
    The boats, the whitened walls that climbed the mount,
    Mark the cathedral's roof, the gathered spires,
    The vanes, the windows red with sunset's fires,
    The gap of the market-place, and watch again
    The coloured groups of women, and the men
    Lounging at ease along the low stone wall
    That fringed the harbour; and there beyond it all<...

See him quake and see him tremble,
    See him gasp for breath.
Nay, dear, he does not dissemble,
    This is really Death.
He is weak, and worn, and wasted,
    Bear him to his bier.
All there is of life he's tasted -
    He has lived a year.

He has passed his day of glory,
    All his blood is cold,
He is wrinkled, thin, and hoary,
    He is very old.
Just a leaf's life in the wild wood,
    Is a love's life, dear.
He has reached his second childhood
    When he's lived a year.

Long ago he lost his reason,
    Lost his trust and faith -
Better far in his first season
    Had he met with death.
Let us have no pomp or splendour,
    No vain pretence here.
As we bury, grave, yet tender,
    Love that's lived a year...

Death is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
"Dissolve," says Death. The Spirit, "Sir,
I have another trust."


Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone --
Man has created death.

While at her bedroom window once,
Learning her task for school,
Little Louisa lonely sat
In the morning clear and cool,
She slanted her small bead-brown eyes
Across the empty street,
And saw Death softly watching her
In the sunshine pale and sweet.
His was a long lean sallow face,
He sat with half-shut eyes,
Like an old sailor in a ship
Becalmed 'neath tropic skies.
Beside him in the dust he'd set
His staff and shady hat;
These, peeping small, Louisa saw
Quite clearly where she sat -
The thinness of his coal-black locks,
His hands so long and lean
They scarcely seemed to grasp at all
The keys that hung between:
Both were of gold, but one was small,
And with this last did he
Wag in the air, as if to say,
'Come hither, child, t...

O wholesome Death, thy sombre funeral-car
Looms ever dimly on the lengthening way
Of life; while, lengthening still, in sad array,
My deeds in long procession go, that are
As mourners of the man they helped to mar.
I see it all in dreams, such as waylay
The wandering fancy when the solid day
Has fallen in smoldering ruins, and night's star,
Aloft there, with its steady point of light
Mastering the eye, has wrapped the brain in sleep.
Ah, when I die, and planets hold their flight
Above my grave, still let my spirit keep
Sometimes its vigil of divine remorse,
'Midst pity, praise, or blame heaped o'er my corse!

Let down the bars, O Death!
The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done.

Thine is the stillest night,
Thine the securest fold;
Too near thou art for seeking thee,
Too tender to be told.

I had a vision in my sleep last night between sleeping and waking. A figure standing beside me, thin, miserable, sad and sorrowful; the shadow of night upon his face, the tracks of the tears down his cheeks. His ribs were bending like the bottom of a riddle; his nose thin that it would go through a cambric needle; his shoulders hard and sharp that they would cut tobacco; his head dark and bushy like the top of a hill; and there is nothing I can liken his fingers to. His poor bones without any kind of covering; a withered rod in his hand, and he looking in my face....

Death is a robber who heaps together kings, high princes and country lords; he brings with him the great, the young, and the wise, gripping them by the throat before all the people. Look at him who was yesterday swift & strong, who would leap stone wall, ditch ...

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.

    Methought the world was bound with final frost;
    The sun, made hueless as with fear and awe,
    Illumined yet the lands it could not thaw.
    Then on my road, with instant evening crost,
    Death stood, and in its shadowy films enwound,
    Mine eyes forgot the light, until I came
    Where poured the inseparate, unshadowed flame
    Of phantom suns in self-irradiance drowned.

    Death lay revealed in all its haggardness -
    Immitigable wastes horizonless;
    Profundities that held nor bar nor veil;
    All hues wherewith the suns and worlds were dyed
    In light invariable nullified;
    All darkness rendered shelterless and pale.

I am the outer gate of life where sit
    Faith and Unfaith, those two interpreters
That spell in diverse ways what God has writ
    In symbols on the archway of the years.

Backward I swing for many feet to pass;
    Some come in stormy haste, some grave and slow,
And all like windy shadows on the grass:
    Beyond my pale I know not where they go.

Pale, at its ghastly noon,
Pauses above the death-still wood the moon;
The night-sprite, sighing, through the dim air stirs;
The clouds descend in rain;
Mourning, the wan stars wane,
Flickering like dying lamps in sepulchres!
Haggard as spectres vision-like and dumb,
Dark with the pomp of death, and moving slow,
Towards that sad lair the pale procession come
Where the grave closes on the night below.

With dim, deep-sunken eye,
Crutched on his staff, who trembles tottering by?
As wrung from out the shattered heart, one groan
Breaks the deep hush alone!
Crushed by the iron fate, he seems to gather
All life's last strength to stagger to the bier,
And hearken Do these cold lips murmur "Father?"
The sharp rain, drizzling through that place of fear,
...

Our vales are sweet with fern and rose,
Our hills are maple-crowned;
But not from them our fathers chose
The village burying-ground.

The dreariest spot in all the land
To Death they set apart;
With scanty grace from Nature’s hand,
And none from that of Art.

A winding wall of mossy stone,
Frost-flung and broken, lines
A lonesome acre thinly grown
With grass and wandering vines.

Without the wall a birch-tree shows
Its drooped and tasselled head;
Within, a stag-horned sumach grows,
Fern-leafed, with spikes of red.

There, sheep that graze the neighboring plain
Like white ghosts come and go,
The farm-horse drags his fetlock chain,
The cow-bell tinkles slow.

Low moans the river from its bed,
The distant pines re...

(In Memory of Henry Kendall)


Ah! that God once would touch my lips with song
To pierce, as prayer doth heaven, earth’s breast of iron,
So that with sweet mouth I might sing to thee,
O sweet dead singer buried by the sea,
A song, to woo thee, as a wooing siren,
Out of that silent sleep which seals too long
Thy mouth of melody.

For, if live lips might speak awhile to dead,
Or any speech could reach the sad world under
This world of ours, song surely should awake
Thee who didst dwell in shadow for song’s sake!
Alas! thou canst not hear the voice of thunder,
Nor low dirge over thy low-lying head
The winds of morning make.

Down through the clay there comes no sound of these;
Down in the grave there is no sign of Summer,
Nor any knowledg...

    "I would not have," he said,
"Tears, nor the black pall, nor the wormy grave,
Grief's hideous panoply I would not have
    Round me when I am dead.


    "Music and flowers and light,
And choric dances to guitar and flute,
Be these around me when my lips are mute,
    Mine eyes are sealed from sight.


    "So let me lie one day,
One long, eternal day, in sunshine bathed,
In cerements of silken tissue swathed,
    Smothered 'neath flowers of May.

    "One perfect day of peace,
Or ere clean flame consume my fleshly veil,
My life - a gilded vapor - shall exhale,
    Brief as a sigh - and cease.


    "But ere the torch be laid
To my unshrinking limbs by some true hand,
Athwart the orange-fragrant laughing land,

Come, Death, I'd have a word with thee;
And thou, poor Innocency;
And love - a Lad with broken wing;
And Pity, too:
The Fool shall sing to you,
As Fools will sing.

Ay, music hath small sense,
And a tune's soon told,
And Earth is old,
And my poor wits are dense;
Yet have I secrets, - dark, my dear,
To breathe you all: Come near.
And lest some hideous listener tells,
I'll ring my bells.

They are all at war! -
Yes, yes, their bodies go
'Neath burning sun and icy star
To chaunted songs of woe,
Dragging cold cannon through a mire
Of rain and blood and spouting fire,
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!

Hush!... I use words
I hardly know the meaning of;
And the mute birds
Are glancing...

He, in the room above, grown old and tired,
She, in the room below, his floor her ceiling,
Pursue their separate dreams. He turns his light,
And throws himself on the bed, face down, in laughter. . . .
She, by the window, smiles at a starlight night,

His watch, the same he has heard these cycles of ages,
Wearily chimes at seconds beneath his pillow.
The clock, upon her mantelpiece, strikes nine.
The night wears on. She hears dull steps above her.
The world whirs on. . . .New stars come up to shine.

His youth, far off, he sees it brightly walking
In a golden cloud. . . .Wings flashing about it. . . . Darkness
Walls it around with dripping enormous walls.
Old age, far off, her death, what do they matter?
Down the smooth purple night a streaked star falls.

The strong spring sun rejoicingly may rise,
Rise and make revel, as of old men said,
Like dancing hearts of lovers newly wed:
A light more bright than ever bathed the skies
Departs for all time out of all men’s eyes.
The crowns that girt last night a living head
Shine only now, though deathless, on the dead:
Art that mocks death, and Song that never dies.
Albeit the bright sweet mothlike wings be furled,
Hope sees, past all division and defection,
And higher than swims the mist of human breath,
The soul most radiant once in all the world
Requickened to regenerate resurrection
Out of the likeness of the shadow of death.