But firm beneath the sea went the great earth,
With sober bulk and adamantine hold,
The water but a mantle for her girth,
That played about her splendour fold on fold.
And life seemed like this dear familiar shore,
That stretched from the wet sands’ last wavy crease,
Beneath the sea’s remote and sombre roar,
To inland stillness and the wilds of peace.
Death seems triumphant only here and there;
Life is the sovereign presence everywhere.
IN THE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER
This is the acre of unfathomed rest,
These stones, with weed and lichen bound, enclose
No active grief, no uncompleted woes,
But only finished work and harboured quest,
And balm for ills;
And the last gold that smote the ashen west
Lies garnered here between the harvest hills.
This spot has never known the heat of toil,
Save when the angel with the mighty spade
Has turned the sod and built the house of shade;
But here old chance is guardian of the soil;
Green leaf and grey,
The barrows blossom with the tangled spoil,
And God’s own weeds are fair in God’s own way.
Sweet flowers may gather in the ferny wood:
Hepaticas, the morning stars of spring;
The bloodroots with their milder ministering,
Like planets in the lonelier solitude;
And that white throng,
Which shakes the dingles with a starry brood,
And tells the robin his forgotten song.
These flowers may rise amid the dewy fern,
They may not root within this antique wall,
The dead have chosen for their coronal,
No buds that flaunt of life and flare and burn;
They have agreed,
To choose a beauty puritan and stern,
The universal grass, the homely weed.
This is the paradise of common things,
The scourged and trampled here find peace to grow,
The frost to furrow and the wind to sow,
The mighty sun to time their blossomings;
And now they keep
A crown reflowering on the tombs of kings,
Who earned their triumph and have claimed their sleep.