Like seeds long buried, these dead memories
Upthrust in their new green and spread to flower:
An eager child against his father's knees
Leaning, he had listened many an evening hour.
Now these remote reworded histories
Entangled with his own renewed their power,
Breathing an antique virtue through his mind,
As through dense yew boughs breathes the undying wind.
Sighing, he rose up softly. On the wall
A dark shape shambled aimless to and fro;
Head bent, eyes inward-seeing, rugged, tall,
Himself a shadow moved with musings slow
Amid his cumbered past, and heard sweet call
Of mother voice, and mother folk, and flow
Of gentle and proud speech and tender laughter,
Story and song, fault and forgiveness after;
And a voice graver, gentler than a man
Might hear from any but a woman beloved,
Stilling and awakening the blood that ran
Like ocean tide, as neared she or removed ...
Faded that music. Then a voice began
Paining within his heart, yet unreproved;
For dear the anguish is that steals upon
A father's spirit lamenting his lost son.
—The latest born and latest lost of those
Of his strong and her gentle being born.
By earthquake, pestilence, by human foes
Long were they dead; and yet not all forlorn
He grieved, for at his side the youngest rose
Bright as a willow gilded by dewy morn....
Felled now the tree, silent that music, still
The motion that did all the vale-air fill.
Once more they bore the body from the hunt
Where he alone had died. Once more he heard
The wail and sigh, and saw once more their front
Of drooping grief; once more the wailing stirred
Old hounds to baying wilder than was wont;
Fell once more like slow, sullen rain each word
Reluctant, telling to his senses strayed,
How while the gods drowsed and men hung afraid.
Slain was the Prince unwary by the paw
Of a springing beast that died in giving death.
Again the featureless torn face he saw,
The ribboned bosom emptied of warm breath;
Again the circle sudden hush'd with awe,
And smothered moaning heard the hush beneath.
Again, again, and every night again,
Vision renewed and voice recalled in vain.
Again those dear and lamentable rites
Within the winter stems of forest shade,
The pile, the smokeless flame, the thousand lights,
The one light that in all the thousand played;
Deep burthened voices while, around the heights
Lifting, young trebles their wild echo made;
Then the returning torches at the pyre
Lit, when the eye glowed faint within the fire.
Even as a man that by slow steps may climb
An unknown mountain path with tired tread
By ice-fringed brook and close herb white with rime,
Sees sudden far below a strange land spread
Immense; so from his lonely crag of Time
The Prince, his eye bewildered and adread,
Gazed at the vast, with mist and storm confused,
Cloud-racked, and changing even while he mused.
Ending were the old wise and stable ways.
Adventurers into distant lands had fared,
From distant lands adventurers with gaze
Proud and unenvying on his kingdom stared,
And sojourning had shaken quiet days
With restless knowledge, and strange worship reared
Of foreign altars, idols, prayers and songs
And sacrifice as to such gods belongs.