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From ‘In Memoriam’
STRONG Son of God, immortal Love, | |
| Whom we, that have not seen thy face, | |
| By faith, and faith alone, embrace, | |
| Believing where we cannot prove; | |
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| Thine are these orbs of light and shade; | 5 |
| Thou madest Life in man and brute; | |
| Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot | |
| Is on the skull which thou hast made. | |
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| Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: | |
| Thou madest man, he knows not why; | 10 |
| He thinks he was not made to die; | |
| And thou hast made him: thou art just. | |
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| I will not shut me from my kind, | |
| And, lest I stiffen into stone, | |
| I will not eat my heart alone, | 15 |
| Nor feed with sighs a passing wind: | |
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| What profit lies in barren faith, | |
| And vacant yearning, tho’ with might | |
| To scale the heaven’s highest height, | |
| Or dive below the wells of Death? | 20 |
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| What find I in the highest place | |
| But mine own phantom chanting hymns? | |
| And on the depths of death there swims | |
| The reflex of a human face. | |
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| I’ll rather take what fruit may be | 25 |
| Of sorrow under human skies: | |
| ’Tis held that sorrow makes us wise, | |
| Whatever wisdom sleep with thee. | |
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| With trembling fingers did we weave | |
| The holly round the Christmas hearth; | 30 |
| A rainy cloud possess’d the earth, | |
| And sadly fell our Christmas-eve. | |
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| At our old pastimes in the hall | |
| We gambol’d, making vain pretence | |
| Of gladness, with an awful sense | 35 |
| Of one mute Shadow watching all. | |
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| We paused: the winds were in the beech: | |
| We heard them sweep the winter land; | |
| And in a circle hand-in-hand | |
| Sat silent, looking each at each. | 40 |
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| Then echo-like our voices rang; | |
| We sung, tho’ every eye was dim, | |
| A merry song we sang with him | |
| Last year: impetuously we sang: | |
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| We ceased: a gentler feeling crept | 45 |
| Upon us: surely rest is meet: | |
| ‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’ | |
| And silence follow’d, and we wept. | |
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| Our voices took a higher range; | |
| Once more we sang: ‘They do not die | 50 |
| Nor lose their mortal sympathy, | |
| Nor change to us, although they change.’… | |
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| Again at Christmas did we weave | |
| The holly round the Christmas hearth; | |
| The silent snow possess’d the earth, | 55 |
| And calmly fell our Christmas-eve: | |
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| The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost, | |
| No wing of wind the region swept, | |
| But over all things brooding slept | |
| The quiet sense of something lost. | 60 |
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| As in the winters left behind, | |
| Again our ancient games had place, | |
| The mimic picture’s breathing grace, | |
| And dance and song and hoodman-blind. | |
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| Who show’d a token of distress? | 65 |
| No single tear, no mark of pain: | |
| O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? | |
| O grief, can grief be changed to less? | |
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| O last regret, regret can die! | |
| No—mixt with all this mystic frame, | 70 |
| Her deep relations are the same, | |
| But with long use her tears are dry. | |
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