| |
| AN AVENUE of tombs! I stand before | |
| The tomb of Abelard and Eloise. | |
| A long, a dark bent line of cypress-trees | |
| Leads past and on to other shrines; but o’er | |
| This tomb the boughs hang darkest and most dense, | 5 |
| Like leaning mourners clad in black. The sense | |
| Of awe oppresses you. This solitude | |
| Means more than common sorrow. Down the wood | |
| Still lovers pass, then pause, then turn again, | |
| And weep like silent, unobtrusive rain. | 10 |
| |
| ’T is but a simple, antique tomb that kneels | |
| As one that weeps above the broken clay. | |
| ’T is stained with storms, ’t is eaten well away, | |
| Nor half the old-new story now reveals | |
| Of heart that held beyond the tomb to heart. | 15 |
| But O, it tells of love! And that true page | |
| Is more to me in this commercial age, | |
| When love is calmly counted some lost art, | |
| Than all man’s mighty monuments of war | |
| Or archives vast of art and science are. | 20 |
| |
| Here poets pause and dream a listless hour, | |
| Here silly pilgrims stoop and kiss the clay, | |
| Here sweetest maidens leave a cross or flower, | |
| While vandals bear the tomb in bits away. | |
| The ancient stone is scarred with name and scrawl | 25 |
| Of many tender fools. But over all | |
| And high above all other scrawls is writ | |
| One simple thing, most touching and most fit. | |
| Some pitying soul has tiptoed high above, | |
| And with a nail has scrawled but this: “O Love!” | 30 |
| |
| O Love!—I turn; I climb the hill of tombs, | |
| Where sleeps the “bravest of the brave,” below | |
| His bed of scarlet blooms in zone of snow; | |
| No cross or sign save this red bed of blooms. | |
| I see grand tombs to France’s lesser dead; | 35 |
| Colossal steeds, white pyramids, still red | |
| At base with blood, still torn with shot and shell, | |
| To testify that here the Commune fell; | |
| And yet I turn once more from all of these, | |
| And stand before the tomb of Eloise. | 40 |
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