Andrew Macphail, comp. The Book of Sorrow. 1916.
‘How pure at heart and sound in head’Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
H
With what divine affections bold
Should be the man whose thought would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.
The spirits from their golden day,
Except, like them, thou too canst say,
My spirit is at peace with all.
Imaginations calm and fair,
The memory like a cloudless air,
The conscience as a sea at rest:
And doubt beside the portal waits,
They can but listen at the gates,
And hear the household jar within.
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land,
Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay?
But he, the Spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.
With gods in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change,
The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame
My Ghost may feel that thine is near.
For here the man is more and more;
But he forgets the days before
God shut the doorways of his head.
And yet perhaps the hoarding sense
Gives out at times (he knows not whence)
A little flash, a mystic hint;
(If Death so taste Lethean springs)
May some dim touch of earthly things
Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.
O turn thee round, resolve the doubt;
My guardian angel will speak out
In that high place, and tell thee all.
A late-lost form that sleep reveals,
And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these;
A void where heart on heart reposed;
And, where warm hands have prest and closed,
Silence, till I be silent too.
An awful thought, a life removed,
The human-hearted man I loved,
A Spirit, not a breathing voice.
I do not suffer in a dream;
For now so strange do these things seem,
Mine eyes have leisure for their tears.