| |
| THE SCARLET tide of summer’s life | |
| Is ebbing toward a shoreless sea; | |
| Late fell before the reaper’s knife | |
| The ripened grain—a type of thee. | |
| |
| How fresh and young the earth looked, when | 5 |
| The sun first kissed thy silken head! | |
| Now blazing grass and smouldering fen | |
| Burn incense for an empress dead. | |
| |
| With gorgeous robes she lies in state, | |
| Her trailing banners cloud the sky: | 10 |
| When Atropos no more will wait, | |
| ’T is joy so gloriously to die. | |
| |
| Whose loss is it, if thou and I | |
| Are dropped into the fecund earth? | |
| A privilege it is to die | 15 |
| When life is of no further worth. | |
| |
| Some newer lives will fill the place | |
| Of which we feel ourselves bereft; | |
| Mayhap, though shadows for a space, | |
| Our vital essence will be left. | 20 |
| |
| The spirit of each form that grows | |
| Survives the mould in which ’t is cast: | |
| The universe will not repose, | |
| Though death and life each follow fast. | |
| |
| Whence comes, where goes the spark we see? | 25 |
| Till time’s last ensign is unfurled, | |
| This miracle of life will be, | |
| For aye, the problem of the world. | |
| |
| Who reads a page of Nature’s book, | |
| How clear soe’er the text may be, | 30 |
| Needs something of a wizard’s look, | |
| If he would probe her mystery. | |
| |
| Oh, for an art like palmistry, | |
| That I might scan thy mazy veins! | |
| I long to know thy history,— | 35 |
| Why blood thy transient record stains. | |
| |
| The symmetry of thy outline, | |
| The curious function of each part, | |
| Betray the work of love divine:— | |
| Does it conceal a throbbing heart? | 40 |
| |
| Dost know the mortal life of man, | |
| Its wants and wrongs and pangs and fears? | |
| Does sorrow trouble thy brief span, | |
| Although denied relief of tears? | |
| |
| Hast thou a soul as well as I, | 45 |
| To breathe and blush and live the same? | |
| What matters if I make outcry, | |
| And call myself a prouder name? | |
| |
| One made us both by His high will, | |
| He gave alike and takes away: | 50 |
| We grind as small in His great mill, | |
| “Dust unto dust,” our roundelay. | |
| |
