LINES TO A YOUNG VISCOUNT, WHO DIED AT OXFORD, ON THE MORROW OF A
BUMP SUPPER (by the President of his College)
Dear Viscount, in whose ancient blood
The blueness of the bird of March,
The vermeil of the tufted larch,
Are fused in one magenta flood.
Dear Viscount—ah! to me how dear,
Who even in thy frolic mood
Discerned (or sometimes thought I could)
The pure proud purpose of a peer!
So on the last sad night of all
Erect among the reeling rout
You beat your tangled music out
Lofty, aloof, viscontial.
You struck a bootbath with a can,
And with the can you struck the bath,
There on the yellow gravel path,
As gentleman to gentleman.
We met, we stood, we faced, we talked
While those of baser birth withdrew;
I told you of an Earl I knew;
You said you thought the wine was corked;
And so we parted—on my lips
A light farewell, but in my soul
The image of a perfect whole,
A Viscount to the finger tips—
An image—Yes; but thou art gone;
For nature red in tooth and claw
Subsumes under an equal law
Viscount and Iguanodon.
Yet we who know the Larger Love,
Which separates the sheep and goats
And segregates Scolecobrots, [1]
Believing where we cannot prove,
Deem that in His mysterious Day
God puts the Peers upon His right,
And hides the poor in endless night,
For thou, my Lord, art more than they.