CCCIII The Grave
I stood within the grave’s o’ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp it stretched its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary; for my strained eye sought
For other limit to its width in vain.
Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray, 5
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in the encountering darkness passed away,
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.
I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp,
Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom; 10
And feebly burning ’gainst the rolling damp,
I bore it through the regions of the tomb.
Around me stretched the slumbers of the dead,
Whereof the silence ached upon mine ear;
More and more noiseless did I make my tread, 15
And yet its echoes chilled my heart with fear.
The former men of every age and place,
From all their wanderings gathered; round me lay;
The dust of withered empires did I trace,
And stood ’mid generations past away. 20
I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire,
Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath;
Whole armies whom a day beheld expire,
By thousands swept into the arms of Death.
I saw the old world’s white and wave-swept bones, 25
A giant heap of creatures that had been;
Far and confused the broken skeletons
Lay strewn beyond mine eye’s remotest ken.
Death’s various shrines—the Urn, the Stone, the Lamp—
Were scattered round, confused, amid the dead; 30
Symbols and Types were mouldering in the damp,
Their shapes were waning, and their meaning fled.
Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe,
Were charactered on tablets Time had swept;
And deep were half their letters hid below 35
The thick small dust of those they once had wept.
No hand was here to wipe the dust away;
No reader of the writing traced beneath;
No spirit sitting by its form of clay;
Nor sigh nor sound from all the heaps of Death. 40
One place alone had ceased to hold its prey;
A form had pressed it and was there no more;
The garments of the Grave beside it lay,
Where once they wrapped Him on the rocky floor.
He only with returning footsteps broke 45
The eternal calm wherewith the Tomb was bound;
Among the sleeping Dead alone He woke,
And blessed with outstretched hands the host around.
Well is it that such blessing hovers here,
To soothe each sad survivor of the throng 50
Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere,
And pour their woe the loaded air along.
They to the verge have followed that they love,
And on the insuperable threshold stand;
With cherished names its speechless calm reprove, 55
And stretch in the abyss their ungrasped hand.
But vainly there the mourners seek relief
From silenced voice, and shapes, Decay has swept,
Till Death himself shall medicine their grief,
Closing their eyes by those o’er whom they wept. 60
All that have died, the Earth’s whole race, repose,
Where Death collects his treasures, heap on heap;
O’er each one’s busy day the nightshades close;
Its Actors, Sufferers, Schools, Kings, Armies—sleep.
‘V.’