Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

Extracts from In Memoriam: ‘Yet if some voice that man could trust’

YET if some voice that man could trust

Should murmur from the narrow house,

“The cheeks drop in; the body bows;

Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:”

Might I not say? “Yet even here,

But for one hour, O Love, I strive

To keep so sweet a thing alive:”

But I should turn mine ears and hear

The moanings of the homeless sea,

The sound of streams that swift or slow

Draw down Æonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be;

And Love would answer with a sigh,

“The sound of that forgetful shore

Will change my sweetness more and more,

Half-dead to know that I shall die.”

O me, what profits it to put

An idle case? If Death were seen

At first as Death, Love had not been,

Or been in narrowest working shut,

Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape

Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,

And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.