| |
| WHERE the graves were many, we looked for one. | |
| Oh, the Irish rose was red, | |
| And the dark stones saddened the setting sun | |
| With the names of the early dead. | |
| Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him | 5 |
| In the land we love so well, | |
| Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim | |
| In the churchyard of Clonmel. | |
| |
| But the sexton came. “Can you tell us where | |
| Charles Wolfe is buried?” “I can. | 10 |
| —See, that is his grave in the corner there. | |
| (Ay, he was a clever man, | |
| If God had spared him!) It ’s many that come | |
| To be asking for him,” said he. | |
| But the boy kept whispering, “Not a drum | 15 |
| Was heard,”—in the dusk to me. | |
| |
| (Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall | |
| Of the roofless church where he lay, | |
| And the leaves that the withering year let fall | |
| He swept, with the ivy, away; | 20 |
| And, as we read on the rock the words | |
| That, writ in the moss, we found, | |
| Right over his bosom a shower of birds | |
| In music fell to the ground.) | |
| |
| … Young poet, I wonder did you care, | 25 |
| Did it move you in your rest | |
| To hear that child in his golden hair, | |
| From the mighty woods of the West, | |
| Repeating your verse of his own sweet will, | |
| To the sound of the twilight bell, | 30 |
| Years after your beating heart was still | |
| In the churchyard of Clonmel? | |
| |
