University of Virginia Library

Friend, you did well to die!
How agonising was that hour
When the last inch of candle grew
A heated pool; when at the pane
The morning wind, a bully, blew,
While you, no whit discomfited
By all these great Spring gusts at play,
In all the sorcery of senselessness
Did hardly stay
To breathe away
The fragments of your span,
Last lingerings of the man
So soon to fashion us supreme distress.
In the acacia on the lawn
The storm-cock whistled vengeance and disdain;
The milder thrush, in harmony with fate,
Piped cheerly through the active flight of rain
Ineffably sedate.
Below him in the lilac-tree
The blackbird in his cottage green
Did sing between
The plainings and content.
O God, I thought, bring back again
His pleasure in the firmament;
Instruct his ears to catch
Some redstart's whisper, some reviving snatch
Of chaffinch music, ere, the morning spent,
These servants of the dawn,
These breathing songs,
Desert the lawn!
His ears, O Lord, were reverent,
And Thou dost know
He loved Thy miracles
With all his force,
Praising Thee daily more because Thy love
Mellowed the woodland with the soothing dove,
Set linnets in the gorse,
Made sweet the darkness with the nightingale
That we might find his comfort in the vale
Though seeing not its source.
Give him to hear again our words,
To hear the birds;
To drink the landscape's distances
With those deep eyes
In ecstasies
At finding spread around him everywhere
The everlasting sameness and surprise.

Friend, you did well to die!
The incarnation of ideals
Is slow;
The health of nations mendeth not;
They go
From base to base
Immeasurably fraudulent
In gross and cunning government.
But you did burn to see
A Brotherhood arise
That in nobility should not misfit
The Maker of our skies;
But day by day more separate we stand,
Pursuing pelf,
Adoring self,
One blood, one fate, but not one Band.
Due to the spade and promised to the earth
We buy our guinea's worth of evening mirth,
Go home and ponder how the money spent
Shall be extorted from the negligent,
Improvident
Poor brother, who, with equal worth,
By all the devilry of biting need
Comes as a test of our prevailing creed
To beg, for Christ's sake, aid!
We, dressing for the tomb and promised to the spade,
Make profit of his hurt
In golden dirt!

How this would wrench your heart if you were nigh,
You who with me
Could bear to see
Espousals of the brick and of the glade—
The serpent street crawl greedy to the wood,
The mason drive the pigeon from her bough,
The hind, dismayed,
From following his plough,
If all this robbery from Nature meant
A crop of fresh content;
If all these rendings of her verdant robe,
Invasions of her temples gave
Serener glory to the globe,
A thrilling to the slave!

Brother, they drive the field-mouse hence,
They steal the finches' home;
From mead to mead, from fence to fence,
With all the power of impotence
The merchant-princes come,
Sending the workmen first to clear the way,
To build and slay.
In half a hundred dingles where of yore
We lay on moss, and spake of Evermore
While blackbirds shrilled the present in our ears,
Are cots and babes and tears!
With moss and melody and woodlands dense
Fled Innocence,
As She will fly from centres of repose,
Northward and southward, east and west,
Within her bosom thrusting as She goes
Her honeysuckle and her pink wild-rose.

How this would wrench your heart if you were nigh!
Friend, it was well—that bitter vanishing—
Friend, you did well to die!