Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.

The Old Churchyard at Bonchurch

Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887)

THE CHURCHYARD leans to the sea with its dead,—

It leans to the sea with its dead so long.

Do they hear, I wonder, the first bird’s song,

When the winter’s anger is all but fled;

The high, sweet voice of the west wind,

The fall of the warm, soft rain,

When the second month of the year

Puts heart in the earth again?

Do they hear, through the glad April weather,

The green grasses waving above them?

Do they think there are none left to love them,

They have lain for so long there, together?

Do they hear the note of the cuckoo,

The cry of gulls on the wing,

The laughter of winds and waters,

The feet of the dancing Spring?

Do they feel the old land slipping seaward,—

The old land, with its hills and its graves,—

As they gradually slide to the waves,

With the wind blowing past them to leeward?

Do they know of the change that awaits them,—

The sepulchre vast and strange?

Do they long for the days to go over,

And bring that miraculous change?

Or love they their night with no moonlight,

With no starlight, no dawn to its gloom?

Do they sigh: ‘’Neath the snow, or the bloom

Of the wild things that wave from our night,

We are warm, through winter and summer

We hear the winds rave, and we say,—

“The storm-wind blows over our heads,

But we, here, are out of its way”’?

Do they mumble low, one to another,

With a sense that the waters that thunder

Shall ingather them all, draw them under,—

‘Ah, how long to our moving, my brother?

How long shall we quietly rest here,

In graves of darkness and ease?

The waves, even now, may be on us,

To draw us down under the seas!’

Do they think ’twill be cold when the waters

That they love not, that neither can love them?

Shall eternally thunder above them?

Have they dread of the sea’s shining daughters,

That people the bright sea-regions

And play with the young sea-kings?

Have they dread of their cold embraces,

And dread of all strange sea-things?

But their dread or their joy,—it is bootless:

They shall pass from the breast of their mother,

They shall lie low, dead brother by brother,

In a place that is radiant and fruitless:

And the folk that sail over their heads

In violent weather

Shall come down to them, haply, and all

They shall lie there, together.