O MY DEAD COMRADE
(for W. W.)
O my dead comrade—my great dead!
I sat by your bedside—it was the close of day—
I heard the drip of the rain on the roof of the house:
The light shadowed—departing, departing—
You also departing, departing—
You and the light, companions in life, now, too, companions in death,
Retiring to the shadow, carrying elsewhere the benediction of your sunbeams.
I sat by your bedside. I held your hand:
Once you opened your eyes: O look of recognition! O look of bestowal!
From you to me then passed the commission of the future,
From you to me that minute, from your veins to mine,
Out of the flood of passage, as you slipped away with the tide,
From your hand that touched mine, from your soul that touched mine, near, O so near—
Filling the heavens with stars—
Entered, shone upon me and out of me, the power of the spring, the seed of the rose and the wheat,
As of father to son, as of brother to brother, as of god to god!
O my great dead!
You had not gone, you had stayed—in my heart, in my veins,
Reaching through me, through others through me, through all at last, our brothers,
A hand to the future.
Frank Dempster Sherman
Frank Dempster Sherman was born at Peekskill, New York, May 6, 1860. He entered Columbia University in 1879, where, after graduation and a subsequent instructorship, he was made adjunct professor in 1891 and Professor of Graphics in 1904. He held the latter position until his death, which occurred September 19, 1916.
Besides being a writer of airy lyrics and epigrammatic quatrains, Sherman was an enthusiastic genealogist and a designer (especially of book-plates) of no little skill. As a poet, his gift was essentially that of a writer of light verse—fragrant, fragile, yet seldom too sentimental or brittle. Pleasant is the name for it, a pleasantness perfumed with a pungent wit.
Sherman never wearied of the little lyric; even the titles of his volumes are instances of his penchant for the brief melody, for the sudden snatch of song: Madrigals and Catches (1887), Lyrics for a Lute (1890), Little-Folk Lyrics (1892), Lyrics of Joy (1904). A sumptuous collected edition of his poems was published, with an Introduction by Clinton Scollard, in 1917.