| |
From ‘In Memoriam’
HOW pure at heart and sound in head, | |
| With what divine affections bold | |
| Should be the man whose thought would hold | |
| An hour’s communion with the dead. | |
| |
| In vain shalt thou, or any, call | 5 |
| The spirits from their golden day, | |
| Except, like them, thou too canst say, | |
| My spirit is at peace with all. | |
| |
| They haunt the silence of the breast, | |
| Imaginations calm and fair, | 10 |
| The memory like a cloudless air, | |
| The conscience as a sea at rest: | |
| |
| But when the heart is full of din, | |
| And doubt beside the portal waits, | |
| They can but listen at the gates, | 15 |
| And hear the household jar within. | |
| |
| I shall not see thee. Dare I say | |
| No spirit ever brake the band | |
| That stays him from the native land, | |
| Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay? | 20 |
| |
| No visual shade of some one lost, | |
| But he, the Spirit himself, may come | |
| Where all the nerve of sense is numb; | |
| Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost. | |
| |
| O, therefore from thy sightless range | 25 |
| With gods in unconjectured bliss, | |
| O, from the distance of the abyss | |
| Of tenfold-complicated change, | |
| |
| Descend, and touch, and enter; hear | |
| The wish too strong for words to name; | 30 |
| That in this blindness of the frame | |
| My Ghost may feel that thine is near. | |
| |
| How fares it with the happy dead? | |
| For here the man is more and more; | |
| But he forgets the days before | 35 |
| God shut the doorways of his head. | |
| |
| The days have vanish’d, tone and tint, | |
| And yet perhaps the hoarding sense | |
| Gives out at times (he knows not whence) | |
| A little flash, a mystic hint; | 40 |
| |
| And in the long harmonious years | |
| (If Death so taste Lethean springs) | |
| May some dim touch of earthly things | |
| Surprise thee ranging with thy peers. | |
| |
| If such a dreamy touch should fall, | 45 |
| O turn thee round, resolve the doubt; | |
| My guardian angel will speak out | |
| In that high place, and tell thee all. | |
| |
| Tears of the widower, when he sees | |
| A late-lost form that sleep reveals, | 50 |
| And moves his doubtful arms, and feels | |
| Her place is empty, fall like these; | |
| |
| Which weep a loss for ever new, | |
| A void where heart on heart reposed; | |
| And, where warm hands have prest and closed, | 55 |
| Silence, till I be silent too. | |
| |
| Which weep the comrade of my choice, | |
| An awful thought, a life removed, | |
| The human-hearted man I loved, | |
| A Spirit, not a breathing voice. | 60 |
| |
| Come Time, and teach me, many years, | |
| I do not suffer in a dream; | |
| For now so strange do these things seem, | |
| Mine eyes have leisure for their tears. | |
| |
