Sailest the placid ocean plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings and waft him o’er.”
At some later time, possibly many years later, for In Memoriam was sixteen years in the making, he added section 10—“I hear the noise about thy keel”—which carries on the subject, and also alludes to Somersby church
“where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.”
For the time he wrote no more sections, but busied himself with The Two Voices, only towards the end of 1834 he wrote section 30, which he afterwards prefaced by sections 28 and 29, all describing the sad first Christmas of 1833, the first since Arthur’s death. In 28 he hears the bells of four village steeples near Somersby rising and sinking on the wind. He had more than once wished that he might never hear the Christmas bells again, but the sound of church bells had always touched him from boyhood, just as the words “far, far away” which always set him dreaming. In section 29 he bids his sisters, after decorating the church, make one more wreath for old sake’s sake, to hang within the house.
Then section 30 tells how they wove it.
“With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;”