Poems, Ballads and Bucolics :: :: University of Virginia Library

Sister Rose with the meek blue eye,
And the Dominic dress, and the milk-white hood,
You have long resolved, you have crossed the flood,
You have out-faced death, and the leper's ban,
For the glory of God and the love of man:
At least you can never die.

It is true you sat in your “nurse's” gown
And waved a hand to the twilit shore;
It is true, when the funnels began to roar
And the stern to lash in the Mersey tide,
You looked back over the vessel's side,
And thought of the Combe and the Down.

But your soul had long ago crossed the seas,
To the purple cliffs with their ladders of sun,
To the beach where the pitiless breakers run,
Where the lepers wail on the prisoning strand,
And Christ's love only can reach a hand
To lessen the sore disease.

Sister Rose, there the roses are fair,
The wild convolvulus shines like fire,
The air is as soft as soul can desire,
The honey-bird gleams, and the fern trees wave,
But the ocean moans round an island grave,
And Death has poisoned the air.

Sister Rose, you will land in a bay
Where the fish like jewels will swim or sleep,
But the shark's fierce fin sails out of the deep.
Fair is the day, but all night in the south
The dread volcano flames from its mouth
Anger and sore dismay.

One can bear to sit down by a corpse awhile,
To see the face-cloth drawn from a face
Which has won from death a renewal of grace;

But how will it be when the face that is death
Still breathes and heaves through its knots with breath,
And counterfeits still a smile?

One can wait and watch by a coffin, when
The lid is closed and the cry unheard;
But what if the dead man called or stirred,
And what if the pain of our agony
Was to tend the dead and to hear the cry
Of the still uncoffined men?

One can love and pity the wounded and weak,
The mangled body whose face is whole,
Whose eyes look forth with the look of a soul;
But, ah, when the body has ceased to be
The thing God made it, no eyes to see,
No ears, and no lips to speak?

Sister Rose, when saw you the Lord?
Did you gaze at Him coming adown the hill
When the leper cried, and He said, “I will,
Be clean!” or when did the angels meet
And strew the lilies about your feet,
And press your hands to the sword?

—Sword of the spirit, and lilies of life,
Flower of the heart, and weapon of fire,
Tender and keen with the soul's desire
To dare this deed, and to face disease
With the flush of your health; in the Southern Seas
To be unto Death for wife.

When you were a child did the angels come
That day that you gave your cowslip ball
To the crippled boy? Did you hear the call,
When the birds were crying about the nest
In the copse, and you carried with beating breast
The poor winged pigeon home?

When your youth with the birds and the flowers was filled,
With the sun and the dew of the Somerset lane,
Did you go to the prisoner's house of pain,
Or take your little white heart of pity
Into the grim and ulcerous city,
And feel that God's will had willed?

Had you read of Sienna's Saint and the dove
That hovered above the maiden's head?
Or of her who giving the leper a bed,

Found Christ? Or of him who learned to die
That the dying might live at Molokai,
That thus you are sworn to love?

Or was it a faded leaf with a prayer
They found on a fallen soldier's breast,
Which has sent you forth on your holy quest
To beat down death, and if God must give
The blow, to bear it, so brothers may live,
And sisters your sunlight share?

It matters little, the angels came,
Passed thro' the streets of the troubled town
To the quiet village beneath the down;
They touched your soul and they opened your eyes,
They fired an altar of sacrifice,
And cast your heart in the flame.

And ever since then, your grey hills gleamed
As grey as the native hills He knew
Who loved His friends to the death, and drew
The whole world after: yea, yonder mill,
With its arms outstretched on the top of the hill,
Like a cross in the darkness seemed.

Sister Rose Gertrude, the gates of Heaven
Are open for you, and your heart that was small
Is wide to embrace the world at the call
Of Love at the gates. Let England prove
At the height of its power, its power to love,
To you is the high task given.

Sister Rose Gertrude—who has just sailed to be the Superior of the Leper's Hospital at Kalawao on the Island of Molokai, the home of the late Father Damien—is the daughter of the Vicar of Combe Down, near Bath, sometime Chaplain of the Union and H. M. Prison at Bath. She is described as being a young, fresh, beautiful girl, with large eyes of deepest blue, and a fair rosy complexion. A member of the Roman Catholic Church, she feels that “suffering is her lot and her profession. Love which cannot suffer is unworthy of the name of love.” For years past it has been her desire to go forth and tend the lepers on their lonely island home of sorrow, and she has equipped herself for the work by study in the hospitals and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “It had always been,” she said to a lady who interviewed her on the eve of her departure, “my wish and my desire to do some of God's work on earth, into which I could throw my whole being, where there was scope for the fullest self-sacrifice, and where I could follow Him who said: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’” She handed shyly a little old Prayer-book to the lady, and said, “I don't know whether I ought to tell you, but unless I do I shall not have explained one of the reasons of my great wish to go and live with and help the lepers. In Miss F——'s small clear hand-writing a prayer was

written on the leaf—the touching, pathetic prayer which is said to have been found on the breast of the Prince Imperial when he was carried dead from the battlefield in Zululand. Miss F——pointed to the passage, “If Thou givest on this earth a certain sum of happiness, take, O God! my share, and bestow it on the most worthy. . . . If Thou seekest vengeance on man, strike me!”