C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
A Poet’s Epitaph
By William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
A
Of public conflicts trained and bred?—
First learn to love one living man;
Then may’st thou think upon the dead.
Go, carry to some fitter place
The keenness of that practiced eye,
The hardness of that sallow face.
A rosy man, right plump to see?
Approach; yet, doctor, not too near,
This grave no cushion is for thee.
A soldier and no man of chaff?
Welcome!—but lay thy sword aside,
And lean upon a peasant’s staff.
Philosopher! a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother’s grave?
O turn aside; and take, I pray,—
That he below may rest in peace,—
Thy ever-dwindling soul away!
Led, Heaven knows how! to this poor sod:
And he has neither eyes nor ears;
Himself his world, and his own God;
Nor form nor feeling, great or small;
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual All-in-all!
Sleep in thy intellectual crust;
Nor lose ten tickings of thy watch
Near this unprofitable dust.
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
Or fountain in a noonday grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
Some random truths he can impart:
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
Hath been an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.
Come, weak as is a breaking wave!
Here stretch thy body at full length;
Or build thy house upon this grave.