KISMET
IN MEMORY OF THE DEATH OF LORD KITCHENER
The Sea has garnered what the Land would keep,
The Orkneys' brine enshrouds him in its gloom.
Unphrased, mysterious, he sank to sleep
In ocean deeps that darken o'er his tomb.
What message sealed his dead and sphinx-like lips
Up from his great heart, yearning to be told,
While strained in agony the stricken ship
Amid that wilderness of waters cold?
Methought while death's tubed menace sped the waves
The Sea exultant cried from vengeful crests,
"Him take I captive to my sombre caves,
For my lost Nelson, whom the land invests;
It prisons still my noblest sailor son,
So from the Land I take its peerless one."
He planned in continents and Empire hewed,
Moulding from out the waste an ordered world,
Striding a bronzed Colossus, grim and rude,
O'er Afric veldt and Egypt's sands, storm-swirled,
Pressing Imperial-purposed, to his goal;
Before, his country's high and luminous star,
He on her altar laid his splendid soul.
Bequeathed in martyrdom of glorious war.
Beside the Cyprus hills or Nubian sands,
By Libya's stony, terraced, huge plateau,
Within the trackless silence, "what commands!"
Whispered the Sphinx, his ear alone to know.
What portents shaped the wild sirocco's rage
Where Memnon tunes across the plain at dawn?
Saw he the vast armies of the west engage
In strife stupendous, in those days agone,
When by the Nile he conquered at Khartoum?
Saw he unmoved the vision of his doom?
With his high fame and liberty secure,
He rests, his task gigantic, nobly done.
Born for the ages, ever to endure,
He would not pass were victory not won.
Behold the prodigy he reared!—arrayed,
The millions surging to his trumpet voice
Proclaim the triumph that his genius laid.
Be brave, my England; it is well, rejoice!
Like Egypt's temples towering he stands
Amid the crumbling nations, battle-strewn,
Shadowing times, shifting war-duned sands,
Prodigious, silent, sombre, and immune.