Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
V. Death and BereavementSelections from In Memoriam
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (18091892)Grief Unspeakable
To put in words the grief I feel:
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.
In vain; a favorable speed
Ruffle thy mirrored mast, and lead
Through prosperous floods his holy urn.
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, through early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My friend, the brother of my love;
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only through the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms, and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
And every spirit’s folded bloom
Through all its intervital gloom
In some long trance should slumber on;
Bare of the body, might it last,
And silent traces of the past
Be all the color of the flower:
So that still garden of the souls
In many a figured leaf enrolls
The total world since life began;
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Rewaken with the dawning soul.
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet:
Enjoying each the other’s good:
What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth? He seeks at least
Before the spirits fade away,
Some landing-place to clasp and say,
“Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.”
With what divine affections bold,
Should be the man whose thought would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.
The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,
My spirit is at peace with all.
Imaginations calm and fair,
The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest:
And doubt beside the portal waits,
They can but listen at the gates,
And hear the household jar within.
Should still be near us at our side?
Is there no baseness we would hide?
No inner vileness that we dread?
I had such reverence for his blame,
See with clear eye some hidden shame,
And I be lessened in his love?
Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me through and through.
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.
So little done, such things to be,
How know I what had need of thee?
For thou wert strong as thou wert true.
The head hath missed an earthly wreath:
I curse not nature, no, nor death;
For nothing is that errs from law.
Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds:
What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age? It rests with God.
Fade wholly, while the soul exults,
And self-enfolds the large results
Of force that would have forged a name.
To him who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshortened in the tract of time?
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden’s locks:
Or when a thousand moons shall wane
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.