| |
| HOW strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, | |
| Close by the street of this fair seaport town, | |
| Silent beside the never-silent waves, | |
| At rest in all this moving up and down! | |
| |
| The trees are white with dust, that o’er their sleep | 5 |
| Wave their broad curtains in the southwind’s breath, | |
| While underneath these leafy tents they keep | |
| The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. | |
| |
| And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, | |
| That pave with level flags their burial-place, | 10 |
| Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown, down | |
| And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base. | |
| |
| The very names recorded here are strange, | |
| Of foreign accent, and of different climes; | |
| Alvares and Rivera interchange | 15 |
| With Abraham and Jacob of old times. | |
| |
| “Blessed be God, for he created Death!” | |
| The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace;” | |
| Then added, in the certainty of faith, | |
| “And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease.” | 20 |
| |
| Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, | |
| No Psalms of David now the silence break, | |
| No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue | |
| In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. | |
| |
| Gone are the living, but the dead remain, | 25 |
| And not neglected; for a hand unseen, | |
| Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain, | |
| Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. | |
| |
| How came they here? What burst of Christian hate, | |
| What persecution, merciless and blind, | 30 |
| Drove o’er the sea—that desert desolate— | |
| These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind? | |
| |
| They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, | |
| Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; | |
| Taught in the school of patience to endure | 35 |
| The life of anguish and the death of fire. | |
| |
| All their lives long, with the unleavened bread | |
| And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, | |
| The wasting famine of the heart they fed, | |
| And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears. | 40 |
| |
| Anathema maranatha! was the cry | |
| That rang from town to town, from street to street: | |
| At every gate the accursed Mordecai | |
| Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet. | |
| |
| Pride and humiliation hand in hand | 45 |
| Walked with them through the world where’er they went; | |
| Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, | |
| And yet unshaken as the continent. | |
| |
| For in the background figures vague and vast | |
| Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, | 50 |
| And all the great traditions of the Past | |
| They saw reflected in the coming time. | |
| |
| And thus forever with reverted look | |
| The mystic volume of the world they read, | |
| Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, | 55 |
| Till life became a Legend of the Dead. | |
| |
| But ah! what once has been shall be no more! | |
| The groaning earth in travail and in pain | |
| Brings forth its races, but does not restore, | |
| And the dead nations never rise again. | 60 |
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