Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Complete Poetical Works. 1893.
Birds of PassageFlight the First. The Jewish Cemetery at Newport
H
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!
Wave their broad curtains in the southwind’s breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.
That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown, down
And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base.
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob of old times.
The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace;”
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
“And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease.”
No Psalms of David now the silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o’er the sea—that desert desolate—
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.
And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.
That rang from town to town, from street to street:
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.
Walked with them through the world where’er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.