University of Virginia Library

I wonder when I'll die, and what will be
The circumstances that surround my death,
The immediate cause and nature of my end?
Whether some fierce disease on a sleepless bed
Watch'd by sad anxious eyes in which I'll read
My untimely epitaph before I go:—
Or slow consuming fire, that, day by day,
Smoulders within and makes no show of blight,
But wears the cheek of bloom, till, suddenly,
My unconscious path ends at a churchyard gate?—
I turn—too late! Death hems me in and points
Into his rank green fold, where I may count
The steps that lie between me and my grave?—
Or will some sudden accident cut short
My flooding tide of life, and I that left
A joyous home, waved on by blessing hearts,
All jocund as the morn, be carried back
A mangled, mindless corse? that home's dear mirth
Gulp'd up in one wild spasm of despair;
My little lambkins pressing round their dam
In wondering affright; the meal prepar'd
With tentful care, breathing of my return,
Left but to feed their anguish!—I am there,
But at no board sit down: sweet lives that clomb
About me, clustering like wreaths of flowers,
Crush'd by the stricken pillar they adorned!—
Or shall I ripen on to gray old age,
Losing by slow and unperceived degrees
My hold of love and life, enjoying both
Up to the last with all my room of heart,
Until it close, and I drop to my rest,
When home and hearts so flooded with me now,
Are either gone or fill'd with richer love,
And earth and I can spare alike each other?

Along the vista of a natural life
I gaze amidst dim shadows to its close,
And wonder if I'll travel to that close,
Or fall half journeyed in the chasmed way.
How darkly do we grope—thick dark ahead
That swallows up the glimmer from behind!
Each step is through a curtain of dense cloud.
Though light be on our feet, this present step
May edge the very brink of Death's dark pit.
We dare more than we know, and hearts would fail
If eyes could see the footing that we have.

How dear to each his little span of life!
Beggars and kings set on it the same price.
It stamps the gold of each: that life let out,
What then are regal crowns and raked-up pence?
Yet for some petty gain we risk that life
Which gives the worth we gain; or stake it on
Some sharp pin-point of honour—worth a pin.—
O full of contradiction! dear yet cheap!
At rustle of a leaf we start with fright,
And that dear life knocks wildly in our breasts,
As if it fear'd the falling of its house
And wanted out—and yet, 'twas but a leaf!
A trifling insult jostles our conceit,
And life becomes a button to toss up,
To see who'll lose or have it.

Is there aught
In this quick fear and sudden rush to save?
Is it a secret monitor that prompts
To cling to life because it is so short—
A tacit protest 'gainst the immortal life?
Or is there deeper truth in the mood that sets
Life cheaply on a straw—an inwrought sense,
Deeper than all our guesses, that comes up
And moves us to the ready risk of life,
Knowing, despite our fears, that loss of breath
Is not in very deed lost life, but change,
As sunset is no loss to the sunken sun,
Who even now reigns in as true a day
As when he fill'd the azure of our noon?

Which is the deeper truth—the one that moves
To fear and trembling in this hour of breath,
Lest it should briefly end? Or that which prompts
To lavishment and heedlessness of life,
As if our portion were the exhaustless air?—
And in what moods of being does each rise?

O ever in our lowest grades of sense,
Or when we use false shifts to bring about
Ends otherwise all good, or when our hearts
Are in the heaping up of cumbrous wealth,
We tremble for our safety and fear Death,
Lest it should come between us and our heaps,
Let fall the cloak that blinded our false shifts,
Or take us from the luxury of sense.—
But in our highest walks where Duty leads,
Not falteringly in doubt, but to the Right
Pressing still onward,—then is life itself
Sunk in the Right, and asks no separate care.
If Right be gulf'd in Death, Duty leaps in,
With eye full on the Right, but blind to Death.
The soul's integrity we buy with life,
And hold ourselves the gainers: yet if life
We had not after that, where were the gain?

Since, then, the mood we deem the most divine,
Gives suff'rance to the lightlying of life—
Which is this self, and gives the all we have,—
I hold the deeper truth is stirring here—
The truth that Death is but a form of speech,
And is no more the loss of life to the Dead
Than sunset loss of light to the sunken sun,
Who march'd as freely down this cloudless eve
As when he clomb the morn all pearl'd with dew.

O be our life unclouded, and our setting
Will not be streak'd with fears; nor will our path
On to that setting be a maze of doubt.
The sun draws up the vapours that obscure him;
And doubts and fears are vapours of the brain:
The heavens are bright beyond. To a pure soul
No one may guess what clear insights would come.
Seek we the wholly pure in the present hour,
And as 'twill leave no dark past to bedim
The ever-starting memory with remorse,
So will it raise no further banks of cloud
To threat our journey with a weeping day:
And, living out the fulness of the Now,
The heart will have no room for a dreaded When.