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I. TO think the face we love shall ever die, | |
| And be the indifferent earth, and know us not! | |
| To think that one of us shall live to cry | |
| On one long buried in a distant spot! | |
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| O wise Etruscans, faded in the night | 5 |
| Yourselves, with scarce a rose-leaf on your trace, | |
| You kept the ashes of the dead in sight, | |
| And shaped the vase to seem the vanished face. | |
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| But, O my Love, my life is such an urn | |
| That tender memories mould with constant touch, | 10 |
| Until the dust and earth of it they turn | |
| To your dear image that I love so much: | |
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| A sacred urn, filled with the sacred past, | |
| That shall recall you while the clay shall last. | |
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II. These cinerary urns with human head | 15 |
| And human arms that dangle at their sides, | |
| The earliest potters made them for their dead, | |
| To keep the mother’s ashes or the bride’s. | |
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| O rude attempt of some long-spent despair— | |
| With symbol and with emblem discontent— | 20 |
| To keep the dead alive and as they were, | |
| The actual features and the glance that went! | |
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| The anguish of your art was not in vain, | |
| For lo, upon these alien shelves removed | |
| The sad immortal images remain, | 25 |
| And show that once they lived and once you loved. | |
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| But oh, when I am dead may none for me | |
| Invoke so drear an immortality! | |
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III. Beneath the branches of the olive yard | |
| Are roots where cyclamen and violet grow; | 30 |
| Beneath the roots the earth is deep and hard, | |
| And there a king was buried long ago. | |
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| The peasants digging deeply in the mould | |
| Cast up the autumn soil about the place, | |
| And saw a gleam of unexpected gold, | 35 |
| And underneath the earth a living face. | |
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| With sleeping lids and rosy lips he lay | |
| Among the wreaths and gems that mark the king | |
| One moment; then a little dust and clay | |
| Fell shrivelled over wreath and urn and ring. | 40 |
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| A carven slab recalls his name and deeds, | |
| Writ in a language no man living reads. | |
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IV. Here lies the tablet graven in the past, | |
| Clear-charactered and firm and fresh of line. | |
| See, not a word is gone; and yet how fast | 45 |
| The secret no man living may divine! | |
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| What did he choose for witness in the grave? | |
| A record of his glory on the earth? | |
| The wail of friends? The Pæans of the brave? | |
| The sacred promise of the second birth? | 50 |
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| The tombs of ancient Greeks in Sicily | |
| Are sown with slender discs of graven gold | |
| Filled with the praise of Death: “Thrice happy he | |
| Wrapt in the milk-soft sleep of dreams untold!” | |
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| They sleep their patient sleep in altered lands, | 55 |
| The golden promise in their fleshless hands. | |
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