We huddled there together all that night,
Women and men from the wild Town;
I heard a shrill voice cry, "We all are up,
But some—ye have forgot—are down!"
"Who is forgot?" We stared from face to face;
But answering through the dark, she said
(It was a woman): "Eh, ye need not fret;
None is forgot except the dead.
"The buried dead asleep there in the works—
Eh, Lord! It must be hot below!
Ye 'll keep 'em waking all the livelong night,
To set the mine a-burning so!"
And all the night the mine did burn and burst,
As if the earth were but a shell
Through which a child had thrust a finger-touch,
And, peal on dreadful peal, the bell,
The miner's 'larum, wrenched the quaking air;
And through the flaring light we saw
The solid forehead of the eternal hill
Take on a human look of awe;
As if it were a living thing, that spoke
And flung some protest to the sky,
As if it were a dying thing that saw,
But could not tell, a mystery.
The bells ran ringing by us all that night.
The bells ceased jangling with the morn.
About the blackened works,—sunk, tossed, and rent,—
We gathered in the foreign dawn;
Women and men, with eyes askance and strange,
Fearing, we knew not what, to see.
Against the hollowed jaws of the torn hill,
Why creep the miners silently?
From man to man, a whisper chills: "See, see,
The sunken shaft of Thirty-one!
The earth, a traitor to her trust, has fled
And turned the dead unto the sun.
"And here—O God of life and death! Thy work,
Thine only, this!" With foreheads bare,
We knelt, and drew him, young and beautiful,
Thirty years dead, into the air.