| THERE were faces to remember in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| There were faces unregarded, there were faces to forget; | |
| There were fires of grief and fear that are a few forgotten ashes, | |
| There were sparks of recognition that are not forgotten yet. | |
| For at first, with an amazed and overwhelming indignation | 5 |
| At a measureless malfeasance that obscurely willed it thus, | |
| They were lost and unacquainted—till they found themselves in others, | |
| Who had groped as they were groping where dim ways were perilous. | |
| |
| There were lives that were as dark as are the fears and intuitions | |
| Of a child who knows himself and is alone with what he knows; | 10 |
| There were pensioners of dreams and there were debtors of illusions, | |
| All to fail before the triumph of a weed that only grows. | |
| There were thirsting heirs of golden sieves that held not wine or water, | |
| And had no names in traffic or more value there than toys: | |
| There were blighted sons of wonder in the Valley of the Shadow, | 15 |
| Where they suffered and still wondered why their wonder made no noise. | |
| |
| There were slaves who dragged the shackles of a precedent unbroken, | |
| Demonstrating the fulfilment of unalterable schemes, | |
| Which had been, before the cradle, Time’s inexorable tenants | |
| Of what were now the dusty ruins of their father’s dreams. | 20 |
| There were these, and there were many who had stumbled up to manhood, | |
| Where they saw too late the road they should have taken long ago: | |
| There were thwarted clerks and fiddlers in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| The commemorative wreckage of what others did not know. | |
| |
| And there were daughters older than the mothers who had borne them, | 25 |
| Being older in their wisdom, which is older than the earth; | |
| And they were going forward only farther into darkness, | |
| Unrelieved as were the blasting obligations of their birth; | |
| And among them, giving always what was not for their possession, | |
| There were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes; | 30 |
| There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice. | |
| |
| There were creepers among catacombs where dull regrets were torches, | |
| Giving light enough to show them what was there upon the shelves— | |
| Where there was more for them to see than pleasure would remember | 35 |
| Of something that had been alive and once had been themselves. | |
| There were some who stirred the ruins with a solid imprecation, | |
| While as many fled repentance for the promise of despair: | |
| There were drinkers of wrong waters in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| And all the sparkling ways were dust that once had led them there. | 40 |
| |
| There were some who knew the steps of Age incredibly beside them, | |
| And his fingers upon shoulders that had never felt the wheel; | |
| And their last of empty trophies was a gilded cup of nothing, | |
| Which a contemplating vagabond would not have come to steal. | |
| Long and often had they figured for a larger valuation, | 45 |
| But the size of their addition was the balance of a doubt: | |
| There were gentlemen of leisure in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| Not allured by retrospection, disenchanted, and played out. | |
| |
| And among the dark endurances of unavowed reprisals | |
| There were silent eyes of envy that saw little but saw well; | 50 |
| And over beauty’s aftermath of hazardous ambitions | |
| There were tears for what had vanished as they vanished where they fell. | |
| Not assured of what was theirs, and always hungry for the nameless, | |
| There were some whose only passion was for Time who made them cold: | |
| There were numerous fair women in the Valley of the Shadow, | 55 |
| Dreaming rather less of heaven than of hell when they were old. | |
| |
| Now and then, as if to scorn the common touch of common sorrow, | |
| There were some who gave a few the distant pity of a smile; | |
| And another cloaked a soul as with an ash of human embers, | |
| Having covered thus a treasure that would last him for a while. | 60 |
| There were many by the presence of the many disaffected, | |
| Whose exemption was included in the weight that others bore: | |
| There were seekers after darkness in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| And they alone were there to find what they were looking for. | |
| |
| So they were, and so they are; and as they came are coming others, | 65 |
| And among them are the fearless and the meek and the unborn; | |
| And a question that has held us heretofore without an answer | |
| May abide without an answer until all have ceased to mourn. | |
| For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched, | |
| Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed: | 70 |
| There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow, | |
| And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed. | |
