Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By Sarah Morgan BryanPiatt

674 In Clonmel Parish Churchyard

WHERE the graves were many, we looked for one.

Oh, the Irish rose was red,

And the dark stones saddened the setting sun

With the names of the early dead.

Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him

In the land we love so well,

Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim

In the churchyard of Clonmel.

But the sexton came. “Can you tell us where

Charles Wolfe is buried?” “I can.

—See, that is his grave in the corner there.

(Ay, he was a clever man,

If God had spared him!) It ’s many that come

To be asking for him,” said he.

But the boy kept whispering, “Not a drum

Was heard,”—in the dusk to me.

(Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall

Of the roofless church where he lay,

And the leaves that the withering year let fall

He swept, with the ivy, away;

And, as we read on the rock the words

That, writ in the moss, we found,

Right over his bosom a shower of birds

In music fell to the ground.)

… Young poet, I wonder did you care,

Did it move you in your rest

To hear that child in his golden hair,

From the mighty woods of the West,

Repeating your verse of his own sweet will,

To the sound of the twilight bell,

Years after your beating heart was still

In the churchyard of Clonmel?