| |
| THE CHURCHYARD leans to the sea with its dead,— | |
| It leans to the sea with its dead so long. | |
| Do they hear, I wonder, the first bird’s song, | |
| When the winter’s anger is all but fled; | |
| The high, sweet voice of the west wind, | 5 |
| The fall of the warm, soft rain, | |
| When the second month of the year | |
| Puts heart in the earth again? | |
| |
| Do they hear, through the glad April weather, | |
| The green grasses waving above them? | 10 |
| Do they think there are none left to love them, | |
| They have lain for so long there together? | |
| Do they hear the note of the cuckoo, | |
| The cry of gulls on the wing, | |
| The laughter of winds and waters, | 15 |
| The feet of the dancing Spring? | |
| |
| Do they feel the old land slipping seaward,— | |
| The old land, with its hills and its graves,— | |
| As they gradually slide to the waves, | |
| With the wind blowing on them from leaward? | 20 |
| Do they know of the change that awaits them,— | |
| The sepulchre vast and strange? | |
| Do they long for the days to go over, | |
| And bring that miraculous change? | |
| |
| Or love they their night with no moonlight, | 25 |
| With no starlight, no dawn to its gloom? | |
| Do they sigh: “’Neath the snow, or the bloom | |
| Of the wild things that wave from our night, | |
| We are warm, through winter and summer; | |
| We hear the winds rave, and we say: | 30 |
| ‘The storm-wind blows over our heads, | |
| But we here are out of its way’”? | |
| |
| Do they mumble low, one to another, | |
| With a sense that the waters that thunder | |
| Shall ingather them all, draw them under: | 35 |
| “Ah, how long to our moving, my brother? | |
| How long shall we quietly rest here, | |
| In graves of darkness and ease? | |
| The waves, even now, may be on us, | |
| To draw us down under the seas!” | 40 |
| |
| Do they think ’t will be cold when the waters | |
| That they love not, that neither can love them, | |
| Shall eternally thunder above them? | |
| Have they dread of the sea’s shining daughters, | |
| That people the bright sea-regions | 45 |
| And play with the young sea-kings? | |
| Have they dread of their cold embraces, | |
| And dread of all strange sea-things? | |
| |
| But their dread or their joy,—it is bootless: | |
| They shall pass from the breast of their mother; | 50 |
| They shall lie low, dead brother by brother, | |
| In a place that is radiant and fruitless; | |
| And the folk that sail over their heads | |
| In violent weather | |
| Shall come down to them, haply, and all | 55 |
| They shall lie there together. | |
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